Question

I create .NET applications for a mid-sized manufacturing company. I would like to create a number of “framework” web services that can be employed by most of my applications.

What web services have you found to be useful for reuse within such an environment?

UPDATE: applications will do everything from e-commerce with external customers to labeling to shipping, inventory and reporting.

Answer 1

I would never create framework web services, or frameworks in general (*). That leads to producing code because it looks like it belongs in the framework, not because the code is useful.

My solution is to go ahead and write the application code (the code you believe would be using the frameworks), then refactor into framework libraries and services only once you find that the code really is used in more than one place. That way you don’t waste your time writing beautiful library code that never gets used.

(*) Never, since the time I actually did write such framework code, and spent so much time doing it that the code meant to call the framework never got finished. Not since then.