The Microsoft Web Client Software Factory is a framework that allows creating ASP.NET applications as a set of loosely-coupled modules. It provides a Model-View-Presenter framework and a dependency injection system based on Microsoft Unity to dynamically wire pages, presenters and other services together. It is produced by the Patterns and Practices group of Microsoft.
The Web Client Software Factory is comprised of 3 main elements:
- The Composite Web Application Block. This is a set of libraries that, along with some Enterprise Library blocks, allows developing web applications as a set of loosely coupled modules. Modules can be "foundational modules", which provide services to other modules, or "business modules", which are sets of related web pages that use the Model-View-Presenter pattern. Business modules can also contain services available to other modules. WCSF locates services using dependency injection.
- Web controls. The most prominent of which is ObjectContainerDataSource. It is a data source control purpose-built for use with the Model-View-Presenter. It simply publishes and raises CRUD events. Your view can then pass event data to presenter functions. This is in contrast to the ObjectDataSource which is built to interact directly with some business object/entity.
- Visual Studio templates and recipes that automate adding modules and, optionally, unit tests.
There are other aspects to WCSF that aid in building decoupled web applications, but these are the primary distinguishing features.
Lots more info is available on the main CodePlex site: http://webclientguidance.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Web%20Client%20Software%20Factory&referringTitle=Home. Note: the reference implementations are in the source download
WCSF2010 and it's prerequsites, the VS2010 SP1 SDK and the Guidance Automation Toolkit 2010 (GAX2010), are available via the extension manager in VS2010.
