Edward Bakker wrote a blog post yesterday on the Service BAS, a new project from the Microsoft Pattern & Practices team. So what is Service BAS?

“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”

So basically the Service BAT is going to help you build and architect services on the Windows platform. The Visual Studio templates that comes with Service BAT includes items such as “data contract”, “fault contract”, “business entities”, “client” and many more. It looks like Service BAT is going to be a great tool, nicely integrated into Visual Studio 2005, helping you to do stuff like contract first Web Service development.

I definitely need to do some more investigation on the Service BAT as soon as a public version of the toolkit is available. You can read more about the Service BAT over at Edward’s blog, and the code will be made available over at the Service BAT GotDotNet workspace.