Jelle Druyts

[This is episode 1 of the Guidance Automation Series]

Great news: the June 2006 CTP of Guidance Automation (GAX and GAT) has just been released! Although it's still labeled a CTP (because it's unsupported), I personally think of this as the 1.1 release of a great tool I've been using extensively the last couple of weeks.

If you've never heard of the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) and the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT), this is the elevator pitch straight from the Guidance Automation community site:

With the Guidance Automation Toolkit, you can make reusable code and pattern assets directly available in Visual Studio 2005. It is designed to simplify integrating reusable code into applications. This lets architects automate processes, and guide their developers through complex procedures that would otherwise need to be thoroughly documented.

So in other words: the Guidance Automation Toolkit provides a means for a solution architect or lead developer to deploy consumable guidance to developers. If you've ever published a 40-page document full of guidelines, do's and don'ts on how to structure solutions and projects in your company and what the namespaces and class names should be, if the developers need to be able to start new projects quickly, if you have a need for code generation, or all of the above - this toolkit is for you. Microsoft is itself using this technology to publish their Software Factories, like the Web Service Software Factory, so that says something about the quality and future of this fine piece of software.

Just to get some basic vocabulary right: the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) is the runtime part that needs to be installed on the machines of the developers that want to use the Guidance Packages. The Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) is the authoring part that helps you create the Guidance Packages and the setup projects to install them.

New in this release of GAX are the Guidance Navigator window, which provides a separate window listing all the recipes in the currently loaded guidance package (thereby greatly enhancing their discoverability) and the fact that the state of the guidance package (which actions can be performed where in the solution, for example) isn't persisted in the per-developer .suo file anymore but in a separate .gpstate file so team development becomes possible. A very handy new feature of GAT is the Quick Register action that can drastically speed up the development process.

In a series of posts I'll commonly call the Guidance Automation Series (or GAS for short, if you will), I'll be showing you how to build a Guidance Package with this new release for a sample scenario that's related to that other big project from the Microsoft patterns & practices group: Enterprise Library 2.0. I'll be implementing a Guidance Package that allows you to quickly start building your own application blocks that plug in nicely with the rest of Enterprise Library. The point is not to provide a full-blown Guidance Package with all the bells and whistles required to start writing these application blocks, the idea is to show you how to create the Guidance Package - so you can go the extra mile of adding all the bells and whistles yourself If you need more details on how to build the application blocks themselves, I can highly recommend the "Speed Development With Custom Application Blocks For Enterprise Library" article by Mark Seemann that was just published on MSDN.

So, if you're into this kind of stuff, keep reading this blog