Christian Weyer and the Thinktecture team have released a version of the WSCF (Web Services Contract First) plugin for Visual Studio 2005! At the NYC Code Camp, I gave a presentation on an Intro to Web Services and used Visual Studio 2003, instead of Visual Studio 2005, because the plugin wasn’t available for .Net 1.1. Well, now I don’t have to use Visual Studio 2003 anymore. As much as I love WSCF, I really want the Microsoft Patterns and Practices equivalent, WS-BAT which uses the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Actually, the first time I saw the Guidance Automation toolkit in action was at the PDC pre-con on Web Services best practices, and it totally blew me away. The Patterns & Practices team (aka PAG) used GAT to basically do the same thing as WSCF. At the time WS-BAT only handled Web Services best practices from the Contract First development style, but PAG didn’t want to release WS-BAT until they could also give guidance for the Code First development style, too. I have to check with the PAG guys and see if any progress has been made on this. If you want a guidance package for Web Services that handles both code first, and contract first, contact one of the PAG guys and let them know. If the community speaks, they will listen.
On a related note, the Patterns and Practices team has recently updated the WSE Policy guidance package (aka WSEPolicyAdvisor). You can download it over at the Web Service Security: Scenarios, Patterns, and Implementation Guidance site on GotDotNet.