We can finally start talking about it! The last couple of days Jason started giving some hints about changing the way we are developing service oriented applications. Christian is even thinking a little further and dreams about a possible relation with this?? All a little confusing but definitely interesting. It’s time to shred some light and start talking about Service BAT!!

The last few months I have been participating in this very cool project of the Microsoft P&P team coded named Service BAT (Baseline Architecture Toolkit). I believe this delivery is likely to change the way you are building services for the .NET platform.

So what is it? Service BAT is a toolkit that provides architectural guidance, tools, patterns, wizards, etc. to help you designing and building services using Windows Communication Foundation and ASMX. The Guidance Automation Toolkit is used to integrate all of this very nicely into Visual Studio.NET 2005. One of the great things of Service BAT is the level of customization. Service BAT doesn’t force to do anything you don’t like. You can customize most parts of Service BAT to make it meet your requirements.

Please note that this is just a very limited description; it’s really much more than this but you have to find out for yourself.

In the next few days I (and hopefully some others) will provide some more details. There is a public community for Service BAT that you can check out. An early code drop will follow in a few days.

For now, just a few screenshots of (an early drop) of Service BAT. More details will follow but this is the (very) short story that belongs to the screenshots.

The Service BAT architecture is based on separation of concerns (responsibilities). This separation is also translated in the Visual Studio solution structure. You can base your service development on one of the templates that Service BAT provides.

You can choose for a full blown template that will provide you with a complete solution structure including a lot of projects or you can choose for an empty solution structure and decide for your self what projects (responsibilities) you need in your solution structure (service). You can than add specific types of projects to your solution. All project types correspond to a set of responsibilities. For example we have a project type that holds and provide guidance for datacontracts, one for service contracts (interface), etc.

Service BAT provides you with recipes (actions) that you can execute. The recipes that are available for a project type are based on the responsibilities of a project type. As you can see in the screenshot below the “datacontract” project type provides you with guidance and tools to create a datacontract. You choose between creating a datacontract  by using a wizard, Code Snippets or create one out of an existing XSD.

(Later you will see that you can add responsibilities to a project type as part of the customization of Service BAT.)

As said, just a very quick and incomplete explanation of some of the features of Service BAT. Hope this makes you interested enough to check out the Service BAT community. Go download the early drop as soon as it is available and let us know what you think in the community!