A Free Visual Studio Add-In and Command Line Tool for Improved
Schema-Based Contract-First Web Services
Design and Programming
by thinktecture's
Christian Weyer
and Buddhike de Silva;
last update 2006/11/17
Version 0.7
for .NET 2.0 & Visual Studio 2005 exclusivelyThere has been a lot of buzz around contract-first Web
Services design & development lately. A number of people thinks
that it is a good thing and that we finally should reach a
state where we all can live and breath it. But most people have
been complaining about the lack of tool support for the so
called 'first step':
- Design your contract's data, messages and interface
- Generate code from the contract
This first step can be done either in code or can be done
with XML and XSD. As it turns out a number of enterprise-related
projects prefer to take the second option. Therefore a tool is
needed to ease the pain that shows up with angle brackets.
thinktecture is proud to present the next
version of the very successful and freely available WSCF tool.
WSCF offers a
simple yet powerful WSDL Wizard that abstracts away all the
nitty-gritty details of WSDL and therefore does not give room
for making errors and wrong assumptions just by trying to use
and applying everything that can be done stated by the original
WSDL specification. The current version 0.7 also enables the
developer to create .NET data transfer code directly from XSDs
without having to have any WSDL at all.
Plus there are number of new items that
primarily made it into the tool based on customer feedback.
Thank you all.
Additionally, the tool also offers a command line
interface to the code generation engine (wscf.exe). WSCF can thus be
included in your batch scripts and/or build processes.
New Features in v0.7
Read this document to see a full
list of all new features that made
it into the 0.7 release.
Fixes in v0.7
Read this document to see a list of all fixes that made
it into 0.7.
Known Issues
We will maintain a list of known issues
here.
Installation
Please install any previous versions of WSCF.
Then install WSCF 0.7 by running the installer MSI while Visual Studio 2005
is not running.
Documentation
There is a thorough walkthrough
document (this is still based on WSCF 0.6!) with a lot of screenshots that explains, based on a simple sample scenario,
all the steps necessary for successful schema-based contract-first design
and development with WSCF.
Many thanks goes to the numberless testers. Thanks!
If you have any problems with WSCF, please feel free to leave any comments, flames, or rants
in our thinktecture
forums.
Older versions
DISCLAIMER:
Please read and
accept the license for this
software. It is also included in the download and the
installation files of the tool.
Architecture Briefings