Jack Greenfield writes a very good consise refined article on factories, explaining what they are how they are characterized and how they are used.

The Enterprise Framework Factory (the EFx Factory) is an architectural-guidance software factory. It provides Microsoft partners with a software-factory implementation of the Microsoft Distributed Architecture for .NET Applications for building applications and services on the .NET platform.This article describes the evolution of this factory, the challenges it has faced, and the features that this factory has developed to address them.

This project accompanies a short series on packaging and team building software factories with Visual Studio 2005 and Team Foundation Server.

The home of the Tree Grid Control project - this project provides a reusable tree-grid control for use in Visual Studio extensibility projects, targetted mainly at DSL scenarios.

The home of the DSL Editor ‘PowerToy’ project - a DSL enhancement PowerToy for displaying multiple customized views of a domain specific languages (DSL's).

In this part of the series we will explore what are and what it takes to build the automation parts of a software factory. We describe the various characteristics and expectations of this tool and how it manifests itself on the Microsoft platform today.

Recognising that there is little practical information helping ordinary professional developers on getting started with building and understanding software factories. We have had quite a head start on this and wanted to share our knowledge and experiences with you and the community to promote the uptake of building factories, which in turn should promote the adoption of software factories and the industrialisation of software in general. This series should help you understand this process and issues at the grass roots.

Software Factory solutions vary in structure today. Typically, they are composed of multiple project types like the ones identified in this series (e.g. VSX, GAT and DSL packages). In team build scenarios, these project types present unique challenges when automated build processes are applied to them.

As a trusted expert advisor for the Web Service Software Factory and the creator of one of the world's first implementations of a software factory (the 'EFx Factory'), which demonstrates some of the advanced features of a future generation of software factories to come from Microsoft, we questioned him on the Microsoft Software Factory Initiative.