Matias Woloski’s Blog

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.

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

UPDATE: I’ve updated the GAT package and created the GotDotNet workspace. See this post.

I’ve started working on GAT recipes because of a project called blueprint that we are doing here at Southworks.

So here is my first attempt. After 1 day I’ve built something that would have been very useful in the old days.

The
recipe is a simple xsd to class generator by just right-click on *.xsd
files (no wizards, no input). I thought that Whidbey was going to
improve xsd.exe but it didn’t. It is just the same as before but with property generation instead of fields.

Today there are some of these tools already, but I always wanted to have my own “xsd.exe” to customize it a piacere.

So I picked this idea from this article in msdn (written by kzu) and created my guidance package.

This
is a very first version that generates a c# entity by right clicking
the xsd on a project. It still needs some refactoring, some fixes and
some missing features, but it works. My assignment was to make a proof
of concept on the GAT technology and provide feedback about it to the blueprint architect. We believe that GAT recipes are great because they are more user friendly than using VS external tools.

The current features are:

• Generates c# class/es by right click on the xsd on a project
• Uses System.Collections.Generic.List instead of arrays
• Lazy initialization of generic collections (on property getters)
• Class takes the default namespace of the project

 Coming features:

• Right click the project and generates all classes for every xsd on the project
• Another command bar to generate in vb.net

 Known bugs:

• Generate for a second time if the target file already exist will throw an exception

Requirements:

• Visual Studion 2005 (Whidbey)
• Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C0A394C0-5EEB-47C4-9F7B-71E51866A7ED&displaylang=en

Download the MSI and install the GAT package XsdToEntityPackageSetup.zip (202.49 KB)

Remember to enable
the package in vs 2005: Tools -> Guidance Package Manager ->
Enable/Disable Packages. Choose the one that says “Generates a class
from xsd”.

Great tutorial on Xpath! basic stuff, but useful when you want to remind some syntax.

http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XPathTutorial/General/examples.html

Today while was reading a post from edjez found this CoolStuff: an xpath navigator to navigate through an object graph

ObjectXPathNavigator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml03172003.asp