Two fellow Avanauts, Gerben van Loon and David Slot, released a very cool solution today:

Check it out at: http://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF and tell us what you think.

What is it?
Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

Why are we releasing this?
For the current version of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is offering WSSF and Avanade is offering a similar service factory within ACA.NET. WSSF is an interesting guidance architecture with a lot of developers interested in it and quite a number of organizations have adopted it. Because Microsoft left out EntLib support for WSSF Avanade thought it wise to share an EntLib extension asset for WSSF.

What’s the difference between ACA.NET and WSSF?
Microsoft is offering WSSF and Avanade is offering a similar service factory within ACA.NET. The differences are:

ACA.NET is a multi-tier application factory where WSSF is only focused on the service layer. ACA.NET adds a UI DSL for OLTP web applications and it can also fully generate the data access layer and database.

ACA.NET is more focused on productivity gains. It has features like auto proxy generation and refresh.

ACA.NET is more geared towards large (enterprise) projects:

The designers support different scaling scenario’s then WSSF: models show less details and it supports cross model datacontracts;

Has Entlib integration out of the box;

It’s able to generate service facades, non http services (tcp, named pipe, msmq) and WCF Transaction settings;

It has extensive training material available;

It’s supported by Avanade.