Web Services Contract First - WSCF (Thinktecture)

One of my old favourites is approaching web services development from a contract first approach as opposed to developing in Visual Studio using a methods based approach. I recently completed a project using the WSCF tool and had in my mind to start my web services by developing the contract first. Now that brings me to another interesting point about contract first development - For most people and teams WSDL is really too complicated to hand craft . So here is my checklist that led me to adopt the WSCF tool for my project:

• Design contract first to avoid dependence on inherited objects e.g. datasets
• Don't want to handcraft complicated WSDL
• Rich generation of strongly typed objects
• Efficient handling of object collections
• Proxy classes that lend themselves to quick programming related tasks
• Code generation so I could concentrate on implementing the methods
• Approach contact first by designing the XSD's first

I encourage you to play with this tool using the provided walkthrough which will give you a good basic understanding of how it works. From there you can experiment with a whole host of code generation features for your objects and WSDL. An especially nice feature is the tight integratation in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. Please note are quite a few limitations with WSCF so it is not a panacea for all your web service ills. The forum on the thinktecture site will give guidance on what you can and can't do.

Enjoy!