Last week I attended a private workshop at Microsoft (Building 40) together with Edward.

The workshop addressed the Service Factory, which can be used in/as a Software Factory. As you might expect, the Service Factory handles much of the plumbing code needed when you create a service oriented architecture application. In the public download you will find a setup that will add project templates, new menu-items, code snippets and documentation to your VS2005 environment.

During the workshop we discussed a lot of things, for example how the ASMX services and the upcoming WCF services should be supported. The service factory wil probably have a sort capability to 'convert' an existing asmx service contract to a WCF contract.

As some of us had some time to spare on friday we also had an introduction on Smart Client Software Factory. This tooling does a lot of the plumbing for mainly the Composite UI application Block, in creating Modues, Views and Presenters.

Besides this two mentioned SF's there will be also Guidance Automation Packages for Web clients and Mobile clients.

So keep an eye on those technologies as they will add some very usefull stuff to the VS2005 experience