My former team has released a new guide that is getting rave reviews from people called “Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF”.

Some juicy quotes from reviewers:

• “ I am new to WCF programming….The guide is very good, very useful and definitely saving us time.  It has become the central document from which we are developing. ”
• “…. you really did a great job!  I think that every WCF developer should keep your book as day by day reference…”
• “Very cool and extremely useful…. I can’t say enough good things about this … it’s an amazing work. ….”
• “Awesome, phreaking, colossal… the content is unique – there is no match of it…Very timely just as WCF becomes mainstream with my customers. … It is serious booster with real world projects…”

Download the Guide

• Guide Download: http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

Contents at a Glance

• Part I - Security Fundamentals for Web Services gives you a quick overview of fundamental security concepts as they relate to services, service-oriented design, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA.)
• Part II - WCF Security Fundamentals gives you a firm foundation in key WCF security concepts, with special attention on authentication, authorization, and secure communication, as well as WCF binding configurations.
• Part III - Intranet Application Scenarios shows you a set of end-to-end Intranet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture designs with a focus on authentication, authorization, and communication from a WCF perspective for your intranet.
• Part IV - Internet Application Scenarios shows a set of end-to-end Internet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture design for the Internet.
• Guidelines, Practices, How Tos, Q&A show self-contained nuggets of information that present both developers and architects digestible pieces of specific guidance. Often code is included to illustrate important concepts and answer specific questions.

I can’t seem to find a link to a hardcopy source, but the PDF is free!

From Tom Hollander's Blog:

The patterns & practices team is pleased to announce the availability of the first "official" release of the Web Service Software Factory. The Service Factory is the latest addition to our fast-growing crop of factories, including the Smart Client Software Factory and the Mobile Client Software Factory.

I know many of you have been following the evolution of our factories for a long time, so I won't bore you with too many details again - but if you are one of those people who are allergic to betas, you're now out of excuses - so I'll give a very quick spiel on what the Service Factory is about.

Like all of our factories, the Service Factory is a collection of guidance to help you build applications of a particular architectural style - in this case, service-oriented applications that expose an ASMX web service interface and provide security and business rules over a database. We have a nice graphic (which is updated from an older one you're probably already familiar with) that shows the basic architecture and scope of the Service Factory:

The factory itself is a combination of several forms of guidance:

• Written documentation, including architecture overviews, patterns and step-by-step guidance on how to build applications within the specified architecture
• Guidance packages, built using the Guidance Automation Toolkit, which automate many development tasks, including creating service contracts, translating between different entity types, generating stored procedures and creating data access logic classes
• Reference implementation, which is a made-up but realistic sample application which shows what type of services you can build with the factory.

The other very cool thing about the factory is that it is completely customizable (we ship all of the source) - so if the architecture or implementation details don't quite match what you need for your organization or project, you can just go ahead and modify the factory.

Thanks to everyone who helped deliver this project, including our fantastic project team (Jason, Don, Chris, Nelly, Sanjeev, Ed, Wojtek, Pablo, Hernan, Brian, Juan, Larry, Carlos, Tushar, Arun, Lonnie, Paul to mention but a few); our expert advisors; everyone who has participated in our community by downloading previews and providing feedback, and countless other people in and outside of Microsoft who have given their advice and support. We hope you enjoy the result!

A couple of final notes: the version of Service Factory on MSDN today only supports C#, but we are working on a VB version now and we will get this out to you as soon as possible. Also, we've already started working on the next version of Service Factory, so please keep the feedback coming to help us make the next release even better.

Congrats to the team for a job well done!