Two days ago, my colleague Rene and I gave a presentation on an internal (Dutch) LogicaCMG event for developers about Software Factories. In this session we first covered some general Software Factory stuff and after that focused on Service Factory to demonstrate the power of this, what I call, first wave of software factories from Microsoft P&P.
In our timeslot we had to compete with three other sessions but we managed to get 160 developers/architects to attend our session. It turned out that, at least on paper; we had the most popular session! I am still not sure about the reason for that. Hopefully this is because the Software Factory topic is hot. Another possible reason for this is that we might have fooled people with the title of our presentation. We choose “Software Factories, how to get a SOA in one hour” as the title for our presentation. In Dutch SOA means “Sexueel Overdraagbare Aandoening” which corresponds to “Sexual Transmitted Disease” in English. (However, I can’t believe that people really think you need an hour to get yourself a “SOA”.)
Besides a little typo in the demo (which of course caused a compile error) the presentation went quite well. Luckily, we had a complete (working) solution prepared so we didn’t have to spend anytime during the presentation on trying to find the typo.
During our presentation we demonstrated how to write a service from scratch (within one hour) by using Service Factory. In our demo we also showed how to use this domain specific language integrated with Service Factory to overcome some of the “limitations” of the wizard based approach in Service Factory.
Based on the feedback I got after the presentation it turns out that people are really enthusiastic about Software Factories, Service Factory and the accompanying Microsoft tooling (GAT and DSL Tools). Hopefully, we managed to get people interested enough in this technology to make them download Service Factory today!
Below some pictures. As you can see we were wearing our cool "P&P shirts Don gave us at the last Service Factory workshop 
