Tom Hollander has a post on the most recent item out of the patterns & practices group:

First community drop of the Web Service Software Factory now available!

The patterns & practices team is pleased to announce that the first public drop of the Web Service Software Factory is now available from our new community site at http://practices.gotdotnet.com/projects/svcfactory. We're looking forward to having you as a member of the community, and your feedback and questions will help us make this deliverable more relevant to your needs.

But first things first, what is the Web Service Software Factory? Here's what Don has stated so eloquently on the community site:

The Service Factory is a cohesive collection of various forms of guidance that have been built with the primary goal of helping you build high quality connected solutions in a more consistent way with less effort. In addition to the forms of guidance you may have already seen from the patterns & practices team, there is a new form of guidance in here, called a guidance package, that allows guidance to be automated from inside Visual Studio 2005 through the use of a wizard-based dialog than can be modified (by an architect perhaps) to fit the needs of a specific solution. 

Frankly, this is the kind of thing we’ve been looking for from the p&p group.  Congrats, team.