Abstract The Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has gained a lot of attention in the software industry since SOC represents a novel way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is mostly materialized via Web Services, which allow developers to expose their application as building blocks for other applications by defining a clear and public interface. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. We present the EasySOC project: a catalog of guidelines to build service-oriented applications and services. This catalog synthesizes best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental SOC-related topics, namely WSDL-based technical specification, Web Service discovery and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that has been implemented to simplify the utilization of the guidelines. We believe that the practical nature of the guidelines, the empirical evidence that supports them, and the availability of IDE-integrated tools that enforces them will help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications.