This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Christian Weyer. Original Post: A (very) small step to contract-first in VS 2005 Feed Title: Christian Weyer: Web Services & .NET Feed URL: http://www.asp.net/err404.htm?aspxerrorpath=/cweyer/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Philosophizing about and criticizing the brave new world ... Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Christian Weyer Latest Posts From Christian Weyer: Web Services & .NET

There is a lot of buzz about contract-first Web service design and development. Maybe I am one of the biggest supporters of it ;-)
Yes, just a very small step - but you never know what comes until Visual Studio 2005 RTM's ... take a look at the screenshot taken from a toy Whitehorse project.

The dialog appearing after selecting this menu item is well known and still badly named ('Add Web Reference ...'). The feature is still very rough, the code generated when providing a given WSDL is not nice - the WebService class is directly generated without referring to a common interface based on the WSDL contract part (or at least an abstract class like what you get today when using wsdl.exe /server or WsContractFirst). Hm, still a lot of work to do there ...

Obviously, the most-wanted 'first step' of of visually designing the contract on a meta level is still missing. But Microsoft now at least ships the WSDL XSD as part of the Visual Studio 2005 installation and the XML editor supports IntelliSense - another (very, very) small step.