Prospective Software is proud to announce that the next version of WCF Architect will be available on November 1st. WCF Architect 1.1 includes a host of improvements and tweaks that are designed to make your life as a WCF Software Designer simpler. An overview of some of the major improvements follows.

Drag-and-Drop Support

All major lists in WCF Architect now support drag-and-drop for reordering items. Gone are the up and down arrows from the Data and Enum screens, you’ll now be able move items with the click of a mouse. We’ve also added drag-and-drop to a number of lists that previously had no way of being reordered, such as the Operation and Properties lists on the Service screen.

Editable Namespace List

You can now edit the default using namespace list that WCF Architect uses when it’s building your project. This will allow you to specify the namespaces you created in WCF Architect or those from external assemblies that you’ve added to your project.

WSDL/XSD Output

You can now tell WCF Architect to output that XSD and WSDL that it generates to any folder you want, just as you would any other generated code file. This is useful in situations where you need to export the XSD and WSDL to a project that does not use WCF.

Access to the Root Namespace

You can now add any service object directly to the root namespace of a project. This will allow you to use the correct namespace for your root, instead of having to set the root to a one higher namespace level.

User Profile is now Linked to your Window Profile

WCF Architect User Profiles are now linked to that users Windows Profile. This is especially useful for large-team situations or where the developer has more than one computer. A major upgrade to the User Profiles is that your Output Paths are now tied to a specific profile and not global to the whole project. This will allow large teams to more effectively use the tool in a mutli-user environment.

Restyled User Experience

We restyled the User Interface of WCF Architect to more closely match what you are used to working with in Visual Studio. The new UI also takes some cues from Microsoft’s Metro Design Language to help improve the clarity of the screens. As a result of this restyling, we noticed a 3x-4x speed improvement when loading service objects with a large number of items.

What’s Next for WCF Architect?

Once we release WCF Architect 1.1 we will begin focusing on our other major project, Technique, which can expect to hear more about in the coming months. However, there will be another version of WCF Architect that we are tentatively calling 2.0. WCF Architect 2 will feature support for the .NET Framework 4.5 and Silverlight 5 with a tentative ship date of Q4 2012.

Because these frameworks are still in pre-release phase, Microsoft’s licensing does not allows us ship production code using them and they will be unavailable in WCF Architect 1.1. Internally though we will continue developing WCF Architect to support the new capabilities of these frameworks as they are made available to us.

With that in mind we would like to announce that any customer who has purchased a copy of either the 1.0 or 1.1 releases will be eligible for special access to pre-release versions of WCF Architect 2 as soon as they are available. If you wish to receive these special-access pre-releases, please send us an email with Your Name/Company Name, and the license key(s) which you wish to receive access too. We must note that while we welcome all feedback about our products, we will be unable to offer official support for these pre-releases and will be unable to support issues that arise due to the changing nature of the Microsoft Frameworks.

Prospective Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of WCF Architect 1.0 Standard. It is priced at $249.

The Standard edition of WCF Architect is designed for small developers who may not need the full capabilities of the Professional edition. The Standard edition has all the same features of the Professional edition except that it cannot create, modify, or import Dependency Projects and it can only be activated on one computer at a time. However, the Standard edition can open and build projects that contain Dependency Projects. This allows for scenarios where larger projects with many developers can purchase the Professional edition for their Architects and the Standard version for their Developers, who may only need to open and build a project.

The Professional edition can create and edit Dependency Projects and can be activated on up to three computers simultaneously.

Prospective Software is proud to announce the immediate availability of WCF Architect Professional. Starting today you can purchase a full copy of WCF Architect Professional and enjoy all the benefits that WCF Architect can bring to your WCF project. To purchase your copy, visit our Store or if you wish to download a trial version, visit the WCF Architect Downloads page here.

What is WCF Architect?

WCF Architect is a brand new way of building WCF Services. Gone are the mountains of hand maintained code and weeks of tedious typing. WCF Architect will generate all that code with the push of  a button. In our own use of WCF Architect we found that a simple WCF design that took 8 hours to build, took less than 2 hours.

WCF Architect’s Dependency Projects are a unique capability that allow you to share WCF Data Types and Services between multiple WCF Projects. Using Dependency projects allows you to write one data type and use it in any project that is dependent on that project. This provides savings not only in code maintenance but allows advanced usage scenarios. For example, we use a Object Database for one our software packages, using Dependency projects allowed us to write one data type that the Database could understand and share that data type with multiple different services and programs.

WCF Architect will also generate ServiceHosts and their accompanying bindings. These are completely optional and do not affect your Services, but they can be a real time-saver as WCF Architect will make sure that both the Server and Client bindings match perfectly, saving you from a host of deployment headaches. WCF Architect can even generate Data Contract classes that support WPF DependencyObjects. It’s all designed to make your life easier.

When we started using WCF Architect internally we discovered that a task that previously took eight hours, now took only two. Instead of worrying about getting our services code just right before we wrote any useful code, we were able to build working code in days. If we needed to make a small change to our services, WCF Architect could handle it in a seamless fashion. We even found that we were able to write code first and WCF Architect could seamlessly integrate with our existing code. Get WCF Architect and take it for a spin to see what it can actually do for you!

Why WCF Architect?

In a sentence. We got tired of writing the same boiler-plate code every day. We searched long and hard for a tool that could automate the arduous task of writing a maintaining the code needed for WCF to function. We found nothing. So we set out to create something that could. WCF Architect is that tool. And we want to share it with you.

The Future of WCF Architect

For the immediate future, we plan on releasing a standard version of WCF Architect for those who may not need everything the Professional version is capable of. If you have any thoughts about what you would like to see in WCF Architect Standard, please email them to us at info@prospectivesoftware.com. Watch this blog as more details will be available soon. Next, we plan on releasing a point version (tentatively called WCF Architect 1.1) in Q4 2011. This release will contain some smaller new features that don’t really fit anywhere else in our road-map.

For now though, we encourage you to take our Trial version for a spin. We think that once you try it, you’ll never want to go back to manually writing WCF code again.

Prospective Software is proud to announce the immediate availability of WCF Architect Beta 2. You will not have to complete a sign-up form for the Release Candidate. You can download the latest version here. We recommend that you uninstall any Beta versions you have installed before installing the Release Candidate. Future updates to the Release Candidate will be made available by an automatic update check built into WCF Architect.

With this milestone we are now only accepting critical bug-fixes for inclusion into Version 1. We are still targeting an April 26th launch date, however, due to some unrelated technical difficulties with our web server we may choose to launch up to a week later. We are commited to delivering high-quality software that you can depend on, and we rely on your issue reports to help make our software the best available anywhere. If you encounter an issue, big or small, please send it to us via our Support Page. We also welcome any suggestion for improvements and features. These requests will be taken into account during planning for Version 2.

What’s Changed:

New User Interface

We’ve rebuilt WCF Architect’s user interface to improve productivity and add new features we would have been unable to otherwise. New user interface features of note: the ability to place project document tabs on any side of the project window; tabs are now closed with a button on each tab; and a new screen for adding new items to a project.

We’ve also continued to polish the user interface and we have fixed numerous minor bugs.

Improved Build Times

We’ve done it again! The build times are now even faster than the Beta 2 build times.

Removed the Custom Port Host Endpoint Creation Methods

These methods conflicted with the design of WCF in certain scenarios so we removed them to prevent them from being able to cause a crash.

What’s Fixed:

• Some projects would not build properly when built with the ‘Build Project’ command.
• Code generation errors involving host endpoints.
• Numerous other minor bugs.

Prospective Software has identified a breaking issue in the Rev. 3 Build. The issue is that it will not generate the extension code files for service clients. This has been fixed in Revision 4. We did not spot the issue in initial testing due to the fact that WCF Architect does not delete the old build outputs when starting a new build. This allowed the compiler to continue working with the old files present. We caught the error while testing a different system and not getting the expected response. We apologize for any inconvenience that this issue may have caused. This build does not fix any other potential issues.

You can download the hotfix build by clicking here.

Prospective Software is proud to announce the availability of Revision 3 of Beta 2. This revision brings with it our brand new interface, an overhaul of WPF code generation, and numerous other tweaks and fixes. This is the last build that will be published in the Beta 2 branch as we have shifted development work to the pending Release Candidate. We were unable to update our documentation and website for this release but you can expect new documentation in time for the Release Candidate.

To get the latest version Click Here or download the update from the Update Bar in WCF Architect.

Some Items of Interest:

To support our updated WPF code generation we had to change how we handled collections in the proxy generation step. You can now pick only one default Collection Type for Service Proxies, however, you can still add custom collections (simply add it to the list and make sure the corresponding assembly is included for that framework version). The default collection is List<T>, if you have List<T> in your Collection Types list you will need to remove it or the proxy generator will throw an error.

The new WPF generated code functions identically in terms of usage by developers to our prior generated code, however, it will now be able to access Private members, check which thread the code is running on, and if not the WPF thread, invoke the code on the WPF thread to avoid any threading errors with DependencyProperties. This is a massive improvement over the old method as you can now write WPFObject = DTOObject; in your code and the data transfer is handled under-the-hood in a thread-safe fashion.

The new interface is a complete rethink of our old interface. The old interface unnecessarily used up a lot of space and lacked features we deemed important to our customers. While we think the changes we’ve made will bring even greater productivity, they are significant and may require some re-training to effectively use. The biggest change of note is that creating new Services, Data, Enums, etc. is now handled by a single screen in the main window. To access this screen, simply click the ‘New Item’ button on the the toolbar at the top of your window.

Well, that took longer than I was hoping it would.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. We recently had a vendor tell us in no uncertain terms that three features that we asked for would never been coming to their project. In this case we asked for tab close buttons (in each tab), pinning, and the ability to place the tabs on any of the four sides of the window. All these features are present in Visual Studio 2010 with the Productivity Power Pack and we deemed supporting these features important to our target audience in the name of being consistent with Visual Studio. We figured that since it’s fairly obvious that the rest of the world is going this way it would be relatively simple to convince the vendor to add these features. Apparently not.

I can only speculate as to why they shot down the request; but it would all be navel-gazing and I still need to ship something. As it turns out we had another docking control in our toolbox from a different vendor that happened to have two out of the three requests. (We asked for the third, pinning, and it’s already been escalated to the product team, so I suspect we’ll be seeing it fairly soon.) So it was decision time, do we continue using the docking library from the vendor that said no and pull it out later, at risk of breaking our users muscle memory in two or three years time, or do we bite the bullet and replace it in the middle of an already intense Beta cycle and build a more solid foundation for the future. We choose the second option.

Unfortunately the second option entailed tearing out the bulkheads, completely rethinking our UI design, and rebuilding everything from the ground up. Eventually we arrived at something we’d be willing to put our name on. It was worth it in the end. We now how a much more functional interface and our foundation is much stronger going forward as a result of this work. However, it set us back by two solid weeks. This will probably leave us scrambling to finish the website in time … they don’t call it crunch time for nothing! But that’s the reality of developing software, not everything works out the way you planned, or even hoped! But we persevere and ship code.

Revision 3 of Beta 2 is now in testing and will be available this week. This will be the last update to the Beta 2 as we shift to Release Candidate development.

Sneak Preview of the new UI: http://www.prospectivesoftware.com/architect/images/WCFArchitectUISneakPeek.png

One of the hardest things I have ever had to do as a manager is say no. Seriously.

At my heart I am a geek, nerd, whatever you want to call it. I love writing code, solving problems, and generally working on the coolest projects in town. However, the biggest problem that we’ve encountered while developing WCF Architect are all the new ideas we’ve had since we started working on it. The list of confirmed new features spans the next two versions and has grown quite long. In some ways, this is to be expected; after all, developers are by their very nature creative people who push the boundaries. We are constantly seeking to improve on something or we have completely new ideas based on something we saw elsewhere. The creative process of developers could take up an entire article by itself. In a perfect world developers could add new features without the cares of release dates or testing cycles or … documentation. We would be free to go forth and create.

However, there is a constant thorn in the side of this ideal world. We can have all the coolest ideas, all the latest features, the slickest user interface, the best everything. If we don’t get ship code, our users will never get to use any of it. They will go to someone who can ship them something that, might not be as nice, but works and solves most, but not all, of their problems. And not only that, we have to ship code that works. Which means we have to spend time on the boring tasks; like testing, documentation, and the other million-and-one details that go into making a quality software release. The real kill-joy here is how much time this process can take. In fact, this process takes so much time that you’ll probably spend the majority of your time filling in the details of Function XYZBleh() that only 3 people will ever use, instead of writing new code.

This is A Good Thing™

I promise!

Really!

Umm … why?

Because if we didn’t stop working on the latest and greatest new idea and focus on shipping code, our customers would never buy our product (it’s not available), then our employer would never make any money (the customer went elsewhere), and you would be out of a job (your employer entered bankruptcy and became a supplier of used dishwasher parts). I can already hear the free/open source software guys firing up their ancient Telnet PINE email clients and preparing to send out a tsunami of told-you-so emails to their for-profit brethren. But free and open source software can fall victim to this malaise as well. Think back to all the really cool projects that took five years to release anything. They had tons of cool features; but you couldn’t use any of them because it had a fatal crash on startup because they spent all their time on new features … never bothering to properly test any of them. And as it turns out, everyone is using the project that got started by a disgruntled ex-contributor of the original anyway; even though it doesn’t have all the cool features, or the slick interface of the first project. But they did ship code, in fact they’ve shipped three major versions and are working on a fourth. If we added every feature we’ve thought of to WCF Architect, it would early 2012 before you saw Beta 1 and late 2012 or early 2013 before you saw a final release. Someone else would have beat us to release and won your business.

In the economy of code, he who ships first is King. And it is good to be King. You’ll get the raises and promotions. Your peers will bow their heads in awe of your coding prowess. The princesses from the surrounding kingdoms will flock to your feet to hear stories of how you vanquished that null pointer bug that was hanging up the entire project on ship day … Ok, maybe not, but that cute girl three cubes down seems really interested in you all of a sudden.

All because your manager said ‘No’.

Saying no to new features or new ideas isn’t really saying “Not ever”. It’s saying “we don’t have time now, but we’ll consider it in the future”. At least, that’s how your manager should be treating ‘No’. If they aren’t, you would be wise to start looking for employment elsewhere (discreetly of course), because even if that company doesn’t go under (which it probably will),  you’ll be hating your job soon enough. There is no faster way to make a developer depressed than to stifle their creativity.

But, there are exceptions to the Rule of No.

The First Exception: If not having it will force you to break something in the future, add it.
Specifically, if not having the feature will force you to redesign something later in a way the breaks compatibility with your old stuff, add it. We ran into this case recently with our WPF code generation in WCF Architect. It was adequate for Version 1. But looking forward to V2 and beyond, we realized that we would have to break large swathes of generated code to get the new code working. That would in turn force our customer to spend hours upon hours rewriting their code to fit our new model. That sounded like a good way to make sure everyone told their friends how bad our product was. And that reaction is not high on our list of goals. So we upgraded our WPF code generation in the middle of a Beta cycle, not because we wanted to, but because not doing so would cause many more (and worse) headaches later, for both us and our customers. (The new code will available in Revision 3 of Beta 2)

The Second Exception: If a widget vendor tells you that they are not going to support a must-have feature, ever; replace it with a widget that does.
Re-writing code is always a dangerous prospect. Things will break, count on it. So if you have a vendor that tells you that the software they are providing you will never do what you want. Pull it out and replace it as soon as possible in the development cycle. It is much easier to replace something in the beta cycle than release candidate/release cycle, because it will need testing. We recently had this come up with a certain control vendor who told us, point blank, that the three relatively simple things we asked for would never be implemented, ever. Believe me, we were not amused; especially given how late in the development cycle we found out. And it’s safe to say we will not be using their products in the future. But we still have the time to replace it with something that works better. So we are. (You’ll be able to work with the new UI in Rev. 3 of Beta 2)

So next time your boss says No to your idea for the new widget that would be so useful; remember that it’s OK, he probably has a ship date that he is trying to meet and he really needs those TPS Reports finished. Bring it up during the design process for the next version. Chances are, your idea will be received better there anyways. A good manager’s ‘No’ is never a final answer, it’s a promise to look at the idea, just not right now.

Prospective Software is proud to announce the immediate availability of WCF Architect Beta 2. You can download the latest version here. If you have previously used the application form, please do so again to access the Beta. Future updates to the Beta and Release Candidate will be made available by an automatic update check built into WCF Architect.

This release marks the end of new development in Version 1 and a shift in focus to polishing and bug-fixing. New features will be available in the planned Version 2. We will be detailing these plans at a later date. If there is significant demand, we may choose to deliver a point release after Version 1 with some minor new features. We are commited to delivering high-quality software that you can depend on, and we rely on your bug reports to help make our software the best available. If you encounter any issue, big or small, please send them to us via our Support Page. We also welcome any suggestion for improvements and features. This requests will be taken into account during planning for Version 2.

What’s New In Beta 2

Dependency Projects

You will now be able to create a project that can be used as a dependency of another project. This will cause the code generated by the dependency project to be merged with dependent project. A dependency project will not be able to generate its own assemblies or code files. In all other cases, dependency projects support all the features of regular projects. This feature is intended to resolve issues where more than one project is dependent on the same data types or separate projects need access to the same services.

Endpoint Manager for Service Hosts

A new Endpoint Manager is now available in the Hosts section of the Project screen. The Endpoint Manager will allow you to control the creation of endpoints on both the client and server. This will allow you to reduce errors by allowing WCF Architect’s code generation engine to make sure that both the client and server have matching endpoints. WCF Architect’s code generation will also generate methods that will allow you to specify different values for your endpoints on the clients.

Support for Properties on Service Clients

WCF Architect Beta 1 shipped with the ability to generate properties on Service Contracts for the server, but the client’s still had to use get and set methods. In Beta 2, WCF Architect will now generate wrapper properties around these methods on the client. This will enable you to write more consistent and error-free code.

What’s Changed in Beta 2

• The Service Callback functionality has been improved to support new scenarios. WARNING: This change is breaking. You will need to reset all of the callbacks in your existing projects.
• The Compiler will now take advantage of multi-threading and the internal C# compiler; this should result in significantly faster build times.
• A Link to the online help (available here) has been added to the File menu.
• WCF Architect will now check for updates and display a notification on the Projects page if an update is available.
• The Add Reference screen will now place a check mark next to References that have already been added.
• WCF Architect will now display an error when attempting to open solutions that are marked as read-only.
• You can now edit the Project’s Name on the Project screen.

What’s Been Fixed in Beta 2

• WCF Architect will no longer crash when attempting to load a solution from Windows Explorer.
• The Basic HTTP Binding will now save Timeouts.
• Setting the Manual Flow Control Limit to zero now causes WCF Architect to use the default value. You can read more about this issue here.
• The Bindings area in Service Contracts has been removed due to buggy code generation. See the new Endpoint Manager for similar functionality.
• The Recent Projects List is now sorted with the most recent on top.
• The Import command in the File menu is now disabled until a solution is loaded.
• Certain networking setups (particularly those with Virtual Machines on the same computer) could cause the Beta’s expiration date verifier to be unable to connect to a time server even if the Internet is available. WCF Architect will now check ALL active network connections, instead of only the first one.
• WCF Architect will now require a minimum screen resolution of 1280×1024 to fix issues with certain features disappearing on small screens.
• Numerous interface tweaks.

Ever since the launch of the WCF Architect Beta we have been absolutely stunned by the amount of interest it has generated. In fact, in the past three weeks since we released the first Beta, we have seen over a hundred downloads. Now this might not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, (and let’s be honest, it’s not) but, for a company with little brand recognition and a product that didn’t exist publicly until three weeks ago, this is an amazing accomplishment. And we want thank each and every one of you who helped make it possible.

This interest has lead us to the realization that we need more time to prepare for the official launch of WCF Architect. We value your business and we want to make sure that your experience with our business is as seamless as possible. To ensure the success of that goal we are in the process of building a customer service website that will allow you to not only purchase our software, but manage your licenses and support contracts, get the latest updates, and view your past invoices. To allow ourselves the time need to accomplish these goals, we are extending the launch date by one month to April 26th, 2011.

The new release schedule for WCF Architect is as follows:

• Beta 2                              02/01/2011
• Release Candidate           03/29/2011
• Version 1.0 (RTM)            04/26/2011

WCF Architect Beta 2

Ever since the release of the first Beta for WCF Architect we have been hard at work improving WCF Architect. We have added three features that didn’t make it in time for the first Beta and we have fixed a number of issues that have cropped up since the initial release. First the three new features.

Project Dependencies

You will now be able to create a project that can be used as a dependency of another project. This will cause the code generated by the dependency project to be merged with dependent project. A dependency project will not be able to generate its own assemblies or code files. In all other cases, dependency projects support all the features of regular projects. This feature is intended to resolve issues where more than one project is dependent on the same data types or separate projects need access to the same services.

Endpoint Manager for Service Hosts

A new Endpoint Manager is now available in the Hosts section of the Project screen. The Endpoint Manager will allow you to control the creation of endpoints on both the client and server. This will allow you to reduce errors by allowing WCF Architect’s code generation engine to make sure that both the client and server have matching endpoints. WCF Architect’s code generation will also generate methods that will allow you to specify different values for your endpoints on the clients.

Support for Properties on Service Clients

WCF Architect Beta 1 shipped with the ability to generate properties on Service Contracts for the server, but the client’s still had to use get and set methods. In Beta 2, WCF Architect will now generate wrapper properties around these methods on the client. This will enable you to write more consistent and error-free code.

These three features are the last new features that will be added to Version 1 of WCF Architect, any new features will have to wait until Version 2. The following list of bug fixes is complete and now available in Beta 2. For more information please see this page.

Tweaks and Bug Fixes:

• The Service Callback functionality has been improved to support new scenarios. WARNING: This change is breaking. You will need to reset all of the callbacks in your existing projects.
• The Compiler will now take advantage of multi-threading and the internal C# compiler; this should result in significantly faster build times.
• A Link to the online help (available here) has been added to the File menu.
• WCF Architect will now check for updates and display a notification on the Projects page if an update is available.
• The Add Reference screen will now place a check mark next to References that have already been added.
• WCF Architect will now display an error when attempting to open solutions that are marked as read-only.
• You can now edit the Project’s Name on the Project screen.
• WCF Architect will no longer crash when attempting to load a solution from Windows Explorer.
• The Basic HTTP Binding will now save Timeouts.
• Setting the Manual Flow Control Limit to zero now causes WCF Architect to use the default value. You can read more about this issue here.
• The Bindings area in Service Contracts has been removed due to buggy code generation. See the new Endpoint Manager for similar functionality.
• The Recent Projects List is now sorted with the most recent on top.
• The Import command in the File menu is now disabled until a solution is loaded.
• Certain networking setups (particularly those with Virtual Machines on the same computer) could cause the Beta’s expiration date verifier to be unable to connect to a time server even if the Internet is available. WCF Architect will now check ALL active network connections, instead of only the first one.
• WCF Architect will now require a minimum screen resolution of 1280×1024 to fix issues with certain features disappearing on small screens.
• Numerous interface tweaks.

Announcing the Bug Discount Program

Simultaneously with the release of WCF Architect Beta 2 we will also begin our Bug Discount Program. This program allows you to get a 5% discount from your total purchase price for every unique bug that you submit and is verified by our team, up to 50% off the total purchase price. If your bug qualifies for a discount, you will be emailed with a notification to that effect. At the end of the program you will be emailed a discount code good for the full amount of your discount.  This program is our way of saying thank you to those intrepid early-adopters whose patience and high-quality issue reports help us improve our product.

The Details:

Feature requests and suggestions do not count, nor do trivial errors such as mis-spellings and other errors that do not effect the functionality of the software. If the bug has been previously reported and verified by our team, and/or was discovered internally before the report, it will not count towards your total discount. Discounts have no cash value and are applied at time of sale. Finally, the applicability of a bug for this discount program is determined by the team at Prospective Software and all decisions are final. Service contracts for WCF Architect are excluded from this program. We reserve the right to modify this program, and will make every reasonable attempt to inform you of the modifications, including, but not limited to, notices on the website, blog, and emails.