Service Factory Obscurities

I am a big fan of WCF. So when I heard that the Web Service Software Factory was available for WCF, I though “got to try this”.

The good news is that I finally got the chance. The bad news is that it’s not so easy to get things running fast. Vista strikes again! :)

I’ll share the difficulties here so anyone with the same problems can find the solution faster. So, here’s the story:

• I installed all the “official” prerequisites:
• Guidance Automation Extensions (June 2006 CTP)
• Visual Studio Team Edition (that I already had)
• NUnit
• Then I installed the Web Service Factory and everything seemed to work fine, including the WCF Reference Implementation.
• So I downloaded the latest Hands-on-labs and gave it a go.

And problems began:

• All the recipes for the Data Access Guidance Package were simply missing.
• Checking the Guidance Package Manager, I was able to see that the package was not loaded.
• I tried to load it and got the first error, indicating (in the stack trace) that it “couldn't find assembly Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library”.
• After “googling” the error I was able to find this thread: “Couldn't find assembly enabling package”.
• The problem was that I didn’t install Guidance Automation Toolkit.
• After downloading it, I tried to install it and got the second error: “The installer encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2869”.
• Once again, “googled” it and found the answer. The msi needs to “run as administrator”. This post explains how.
• The strange thing is that although this solution didn’t allow me to install the GAT correctly (still getting the same error), the Data Access Package is now loaded correctly.

So finally things are running smoothly. I dislike Vista a little bit more but my work on the Web Service Factory is looking promising. If time permits I’ll post a bit more on that.

Hope this helps someone.