July Web Service Factory and Smart Client BAT is Out!
Both the July drop of the Web Service Factory or Service BAT is out and the June SCBAT are out. I am super excited about this as it is nearing V1 and we are using both of these in production code. I have been blogging about the Service Bat since the begining. I talked about my SCBAT experiences here and that the SCBAT has helped us reduce our UI and CAB costs 5 to 1.
Remember to install the the new June 2006 release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Toolkit, first! A couple of real cool things on the Services BAT according to Tom:
- The installation process has been streamlined
- And the biggest news is that the Service Factory now has a brand new guidance package dedicated to helping you build data access layers using ADO.NET 2.0. The goal of this guidance was not to be an object-relational mapping framework or an entirely new approach to data access. Instead it's designed to take out some of the repetitive and error-prone work of creating a data access layer by hand, by helping to create some (but not all) of the key classes used in a data access layer.
- Most of you are probably already aware that the choice of available technologies for building data access layers will be changing significantly in the future with the advent of LINQ to ADO.NET. We're already working with these teams to start planning for these technologies, and we'll be publishing samples that show how the Service Factory guidance will look in a LINQ to ADO.NET world.
I said this in all three of my recent INETA talks: PAG is the best group in Microsoft right now.