Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit

The Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) expands the capabilities of Visual Studio by allowing architects and developers to run guidance packages, such as those included in Software Factories, which automate key development tasks from within the Visual Studio environment.

The Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) is an extension to Visual Studio that allows architects to author rich, integrated user experiences for reusable assets including frameworks, components and patterns. The resulting Guidance Packages are composed of templates, wizards and recipes, which help developers build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture guidance.

	Introduction to the Guidance Automation Toolkit This article provides an overview of Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) goals and benefits. It also introduces the important concepts and components found within the GAT, such as recipes, templates and wizards.
	Download the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit February 2008 Release for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 The Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) enable you to run Guidance Packages, such as the Guidance Automation Toolkit or those included in Software Factories. You can use the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) to author or customize Guidance Packages.

Guidance Automation Toolkit Welcome to the Guidance Automation Toolkit workbench! Look below for the most recent posts about the Guidance Automation Toolkit.   Grigori Melnik Generics support in Unity Community! As you know we are currently working on EntLib4.1/Unity1.2. We’ve already addressed a number of stories, including one of the most requested features of Unity – improved support for generics. In particular, we now fully support generic de... plus Agile2008 selected sessions online You wish you could have made it to Agile2008 in Toronto 2 weeks ago? A small number of sessions is now available online. 18 sessions have been recorded, 3 of which are already made available: −       Natural Laws of Sof... plus Acceptance Test Engineering guide - How to Decide if Software is Ready for You or Your Customer - Community Preview 2 released On Monday, we  released our CTP2 on Codeplex: http://codeplex.com/TestingGuidance. You’ll see it now includes the consumption model and also some recommendations on how to read the guide. There are three parts. Part I. Narratives and Models - th... plus Tom Hollander  Gosh! GAT/GAX is Golden! Hot off the presses: the February 2008 release of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions is now available. In addition to a number of new features, it's great to see that GAT/GAX has finally been allowed to graduate from C... plus GAX += 0.1; Grigori has just announced the release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit, July 2007 CTP (or simply "1.3" to their mates). While I would have personally liked to see a more substantial list of changes, this looks li... plus GAX 1.3 for Orcas announced Grigori Melnik, who has taken over responsibility of GAX and Enterprise Library since my departure from patterns & practices, has spilled the beans on the initial plans for the next version of GAX, which is being called 1.3 internally (... plus Wojtek Kozaczynski New Version of GAX It has been a while since I posted a message, but this occasion is hard to pass; we will be releasing a new version of GAX.   Since the last release in December we have been using GAX and GAT extensively on a number of projects including the Sm... plus Recipes Are Not Wizards I was helping another friend design a guidance package, and I realized that he was thinking about recipes as wizards. This is not such a good idea, and may lead to misusing GAT.   Recipes are simple animals; they get information from the user... plus Nothing Shows Up Without a Reference I was helping Eugenio write his first guidance package. He asked me to show him a few things "so he did not have to read the documentation" J. He created a project template by copying one of the existing ones, rebuilt the guidance package solution (w... plus Victor Garcia Aprea  VSX Devcon: All about extending Visual Studio If you are into extending the best IDE ever you already know that is not an easy task. You will find challenges all day (some days just too many of them...) and you may spend an entire day (or a couple of them...) trying to accomplish even the most t... plus VS: simply things which are incredibly hard There are some very clear examples out there about what I mean when I talk about VS obscurity being a major pain for getting people extending the platform and trying to make my dream come true. As a rule of thumb people should know that if demos... plus The VSX team is listening too I remember the time (3 years ago) when I was dogfooding latest ASP.Net bits and entering bugs like hell. I was also publicly posting most of my findings about what I did and didn't like and I always got nothing but a very good reaction from the ASP.N... plus Oscar Calvo  Intro Hello, after working with DevDiv and p&p as vendor for the past 7 years (wow, I can't believe it's so long) I finally joined Microsoft as a full time employee. I joined the VS Team Architect team as an SDE 2 months ago. I joined the tea... plus The Evil EnvDTE namespace Link Daniel Cazzulino

Learn Articles Introduction to the Guidance Automation Toolkit Downloads Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions February 2008 Release for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 Participate Forums Guidance Automation Toolkit Forum Post your questions, comments and suggestions in this forum for the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Chats and Webcasts Packaging Design and Architecture Guidance for Visual Studio This webcast shows how design and architecture guidance is packaged for direct availability in Microsoft Visual Studio. The key idea is an integration of Visual Studio templates and recipes into units of guidance called Guidance Packages. Report Bugs and Suggestions Product Feedback Visit the New MSDN Product Feedback Center, the place to find known issues and workarounds, submit bugs, make suggestions, and get the latest info directly from Microsoft's product teams. Other Resources Related Sites patterns & practices Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Architects Visual Studio Extensibility Center

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