Matias Woloski’s Blog

My good friend Pablo Galiano has been working on a VSIP software factory lately. I had never did a VSIP package myself, but it seems like a lot of work to do simple things like adding a command. This software factory provides a bunch of recipes (developed with GAX/GAT) that will do all the dirty job for you.

Check it out here: http://www.codeplex.com/vsipfactory

John Socha, the guy who wrote the great Norton Commander, created this new wiki called CABPedia to share information regarding CAB, Smart Client Software Factory and Mobile Client Software Factory.
This site was necesary for the CAB community and my vision is

“CABPedia should be simple enough to be the starting point for everyone that wants to use [CAB, SCSF, MCSF] and don’t know where to start
but also has the deepness to provide experienced users accurate definitions of every concept around CAB, SCSF, MCSF”

Let’s share now!

What? TechNight:
Fábricas de Software
When? 11 de Agosto / 18:30 a 21:30 hs.
Where? Microsoft Argentina, Bouchard 710,
4º piso, Buenos Aires.
Who? Angel Lopez (Microsoft MVP), Alejandro Jack (Microsoft MVP, Southworks S.R.L.),
Matias Woloski (Dev team Patterns & Practices, Southworks S.R.L.), Juan
Maronese.

Together with Angel and Alex we will be talking about
software factories and the concepts around them and finally we will go deep into patterns & practices software factories.
See
you there!

Subscribe
here

Don Smith started a series of blogcasts where he is showing some of the Service Factory functionality. As usual this is very good stuff and very developer-friendly.

The first public drop of Service Factory is available on the workspace.

Download it and give feedback on the message boards! If you want to
keep updated with this project, here you have a list of Service Factory
bloggers:

• Don Smith
• Jason Hogg
• Tom Hollander
• Pablo Galiano
• Pablo Cibraro
• Christian Weyer
• Edward Bakker
• Beat Schwegler
• Matias Woloski

I will post more about this exciting project in the next weeks.

Last week Roberto Schatz, DPE Architect, and Ramiro Iturregui, ISV Developer, organized an
Architects meeting at Microsoft,
Argentina. Eugenio Pace, Product Manager for patterns & practices, and me,
talked about many exciting things including:

• The
  current status of the patterns
  & practices group. Patterns
  & practices won’t be an isolated group anymore; they will be part of a
  product team that will enroll Visual Studio Team System, p&p and MSF
  together.
• What
  patterns & practices been working on? In the UX area CAB was broadly
  adopted and now the SCBAT
  (Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit) is what the developer needs to
  create a Smart Client application. Including guidance right into Visual
  Studio 2005 using GAT (right-click
  -> Add Cab Module, etc), documentation, hands on labs, and two
  reference implementations showing how to manage offline scenarios,
  multiple modules, role-based UI, among other things.
• There
  is news also in the services area (everything that goes from the proxy to
  the database). The SVCBAT (Service BAT) now renamed to Web
  Service Software Factory, has been launched and the first
  drop is available. I encourage you to download it and give feedback
  about your needs in this space.

 Finally, we did some Q&A and gathered some feedback. There
were interesting questions about the past, the present and the future of p&p
deliverables. Thankfully, some attractive croissants entered the room because I
was starving already. J

Angel Lopez who was there and blogged
about it

Don Smith announced today that Service BAT Service Factory is finally a public project. I’ve been part of this project since the beginning of the year and I can tell you that I’m pretty excited about it. Jason Hogg said that this were going to change the way we develop SO applications.

This is a great moment for people writing Service Oriented apps using Microsoft technologies!

First, if you are not aware of patterns & practices latest
activities, let me tell you that they’ve been creating BATs, Baseline
Architecture Toolkits, which are more than App Blocks. They cover the
whole thing! The first one was the SC-BAT (for Smart Client apps using CAB) which was more than successful. So here is the definition:

 What is a BAT? A BAT is a collection of various forms of guidance (written
guidance like patterns, reusable code like application blocks,
executable code like reference implementations, and guidance packages
embedded in Visual Studio) to help .NET developers and architects build
a certain kind of application.

What is the scope of Service BAT Service Factory? In short, from the proxy to the database.

Join this project if you want to

• Write Service Oriented apps using WCF or ASMX
• Leverage the best practices and the experience of a 50 recognized experts in the
  field (the advisor board) and a group of Redmond brainees
• Automate the menial tasks of creating a Service by leveraging the use of GAT
• If you were looking for the Grail on writing backends for Enterprise Applications
• Solve most of the cross-cutting concerns (Exception Shielding, Logging, Versioning, Security, Data Entitlement, and more)
• Align to WCF
• Have great tooling for WCF

See you there!

UPDATE: want to see some early screenshots? look at Edward Bakker post. Christian Weyer also blogged about it.

UPDATE 2: Service BAT was rebranded. Now it’s Web Service Software Factory.

It’s been a long week here in Redmond. The workshop was really good showing
the latest patterns & practices stuff in the UX area: CAB and GAT
together.

I’m glad I was able to help during the labs and all of you
guys were really good working with CAB. The level of your questions was way too
much!

I had the opportunity to put some faces to my daily blogs (Brad Wilson, Peter Provost, Sam Gentile, Wojtek Kozaczynski, and more) and also talk
with very smart people.

I also met Andres
Aguiar from Deklarit, Gabriel Lopez from Infocorp
and the guys from Clarius were also
there.

Andres, you still have to show me what you guys did with Deklarit and CAB! I hope that we will meet in a
place near Argentina or Uruguay the next time

These are some pictures I took

The lab full and the guys standing there are me, Juan Carlos

Elichirigoity and Wojtek

Eugenio did a great job this week and I finally endup doing the hardwork.

At the end of the day Ale Jack and me eating Pizza in… who knows where

My Blog has been moved… This is the new url: http://blogs.southworks.net/blogs/matiaswoloski

As I said in this post, I’ve created the GotDotNet workspace for this GAT package.

Features:

• Xsd to C# (Individual files or Projects containing xsd files)
  
• The classes will have the default namespace of the project
  
• Supports folders and the result class will have the namespace according to the folder where the xsd is + the project namespace
  
• Lazy initialization of collections (on property getters)
  
• unbounded nodes are converted to System.Collections.Generic.List

I’ve uploaded the msi package and whoever wants to contribute on this project is welcomed. Indeed GDN released the SCC plugin for VS 2005 Beta 2