WSCF Blue is now open
Christian Weyer has now announced that WSCF-Blue the code name for the next version of WSCF – Web Services Contract First is now an open project on CodePlex and is looking for people to participate and take the lead on driving the tool forwards.
In case you havent come across it so far, WSCF is a really cool add-in which has a wizard that allows you to build a WSDL from a set of XSDs and then generate the ASMX for it. it also has a very good Data-Contract (pre WCF) code generator which i found to be much better than XSD.exe or XSDObjectGen and the data contract tool can be used over any XSD independently of the WSDLs. It can also generate client side proxies. Overall the quality of the code it generates is very high. One of the key aims of WSCF Blue is to bring it into the WCF world.
I used WSCF extensively for ASMX services in my previous job as all our implementations were WSDL first. In fact we supplied clients with those WSDLs and then published Biztalk schema webservices and when taking care to use the “Bare” format in BTS, the clients didnt notice the difference at all when the implementations were ready.
In the forums, it appeared that people were clamoring for it to be open sourced as the good folk at thinktecture havent had time to do as much with it as they had planned. I think its really good that they have opened it up now. The tool has great potential.
Some of the areas i think it can be extended are
- Making it a full fledged GAT package
- Linking it with the ServiceFactory – particularly as the SF lacks a WSDL import facility (although you can use prebuilt XSDs when defining your contracts)
- maybe even linking into BizTalk
I’m in but i cant lead it unfortunately as i have too many irons in the fire right now.
So if there are any takers for a lead role on this or to contribute please contact Christian Weyer.
[UPDATE]: Edward Bakker has now taken up the lead role on the project.
