Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows® Communication Foundation

Appendix A. WCF Template Extensions in Visual Studio

In November of 2006, Microsoft released the November 2006 CTP of the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for the .NET Framework 3.0. Those extensions provided support for building .NET Framework 3.0 Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation applications using the released version of Visual Studio 2005. At the time of this writing, the November release of the VS extensions was the latest.

It was stated at the very beginning of this book that most, if not all, of the examples would be done manually, even though there were Visual Studio extensions and template add-ins available to assist the developer in developing WCF services and applications. The reason given at that time was that doing it manually was to provide a foundation from which to build upon regarding the architecture of WCF.

Taken from Chapter 3, examples were built manually because "...building the service manually will provide a better understanding of the components and procedures necessary to build a WCF service. When using the built-in templates, all the necessary components and references are added to the project for you and it is easy to miss something important that the template added for you."

However, as promised throughout the book, this appendix is here to provide you with some insight to the current set of Windows Communication Foundation extensions and add-ins for Visual Studio 2005. Let me reiterate again that the current set of extensions, ...