Patterns & Practices’ Web Service Factory

While deeply mourning over losing my Idols Contest (well, a little bit), I visited Don Smith's introduction of the P&P's Web Service Software Factory. Since we at Ordina have a lot of experience with software factories through its DSL-based SMART-Microsoft Software Factory, I was eager to find out what Microsoft has been up to here. Their Service Factory is actually pretty cool. Although ours focusses more on leveraging the business domain (using DSL Designers), their's has a more technical origin. Using the Guidance Application Toolkit and a lot of wizards and dialogs, it provides guidance for tasks like generating the solution skeleton, securing your website, adding new WCF data and service contracts, and much more. Unlike SMART-Microsoft though, it does not support a fully functional object-relational mapper or any fancy model designers. Nevertheless, I think that both solutions can benefit from eachother very well. By combining them, you'll get the best solution for reaching the optimum business value while retaining the technical flexibility to match any possible scenario.