Guidance Automation Tookit ( GAT )

Unity 1.0 Released - Patterns & Practices IoC Container

Dave Hayden — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:33:00 GMT

Unity 1.0 Released - Patterns & Practices IoC Container

by David Hayden, Florida ASP.NET Developer

Microsoft Patterns & Practices Released Unity 1.0 today. Unity is an Inversion of Control ( IoC ) Container and Dependency Injection Tool from Microsoft Patterns & Practices that uses ObjectBuilder 2.0 as its dependency injection engine.

You can learn more about Unity by watching the following screencasts:

You can also read some tutorials on using Unity:

Download Unity.

T4 Editor - Cool Visual Studio Editor for T4 Templates Used in Software Factories

Dave Hayden — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:08:00 GMT

T4 Editor - Cool Visual Studio Editor for T4 Templates Used in Software Factories

by David Hayden ( Tampa .NET Developer ), Filed: .NET Tools

Last night while presenting the Repository Factory at the Tampa .NET Developer Group, we discussed the ability to modify the T4 Templates used by the Repository Factory so that one can customize them based on their own coding standards and needs. Up until this morning I have been painstakingly modifying the T4 Templates within Visual Studio with no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.

This morning I found the T4 Editor by Clarius Consulting that will allow you to get a better user experience while customizing and building your own T4 Templates. It is still in beta but has a version for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 that will work side-by-side. The features when it becomes RTM look to be pretty cool:

Support for multiple T4 Hosts (DSL Tools, GAX and Clarius ones)
Preview transformation of templates
IntelliSense support for code blocks in C# and VB (ala VS ASP.Net editor)
User preferences (via Tools->Option) for colors, indenting, etc.
Properties Inspector support for entering template properties
Visual Studio project and item templates
Tooling support to generate artifacts from databases
Samples for C# and VB.NET

I am just getting started with it this morning and have more questions than answers at the moment, but here is a snapshot of a T4 Template from the Repository Factory that we talked about last night with the T4 Editor installed in VS 2005:

The user experience is already a thousand times better.

They have some short videos that give you the full effect. Learn more here.

by David Hayden ( Tampa .NET Developer ), Filed: .NET Tools

Microsoft Patterns and Practices April 2007 DVD Released

Dave Hayden — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:32:00 GMT

Microsoft Patterns and Practices April 2007 DVD Released

by David Hayden ( Microsoft MVP C# )

A quick crosspost from PnPGuidance since I have yet to add an RSS Feed to it :)

Although it says April, it was just released at the end of July.

Patterns and Practices April 2007 DVD Released

This is a pretty big download that you can get from here.

I wish the description was a little more descriptive so we knew what new and enticing things may be on it. I also wonder if you can get it sent by mail for free by being added to a mailing list? Yeah, I am trying to figure out how to avoid the download :)

Software Factories - What Are They and Why Do I Care???

Dave Hayden — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:56:00 GMT

Software Factories - What Are They and Why Do I Care???

by David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer )

Erik Gunvaldson has a nice storyboard illustration of the value of software factories. Like Erik, I get the question a lot. I changed a bit of the wording from one of the storyboards to sum up how I think of software factories:

“Software is built in a systematic, predictable, and productive manner using components from software factories leveraging today’s leading design, development, testing, and deployment tools and guidance.”

Not bad for 1 sentence :)

News Feed: David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer )

Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit Feb 2007 CTP Available for Download

Dave Hayden — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:59:00 GMT

Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit Feb 2007 CTP Available for Download

by David Hayden ( Sarasota Web Development ), Filed: Web Client Software Factory, Web Service Software Factory

I wasn't expecting this, but the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Team released the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit February 2007 CTP for Download.

According to Tom, this is a minor release with the following changes:

“The February 2007 CTP is a minor maintenance release over the previous June 2006 CTP - internally we are calling this our 1.2 release. While it does not contain any brand new features, we have fixed quite a number of bugs that many of you wil have experienced. The full list of fixes is included in the release notes, and copied here for your convenience, but the key fixes are:

Support for Windows Vista
Guidance Navigator performance and display improvements
Handling of read-only .gpstate files
Use of standard system colors in wizards and dialogs
Fixes to registration recipes“

I think I am going to hold off installing it as I don't feel like uninstalling and re-installing my Guidance Packages. I will file it under “If it ain't broke, don't fix it“ until I actually get a problem :)

You can download it from here.

Source: David Hayden ( Sarasota Web Development )

Filed: Web Client Software Factory, Web Service Software Factory

Web Service Software Factory - Guidance Automation Extensions ( Code Generation ) on Steroids

Dave Hayden — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:00:00 GMT

Web Service Software Factory - Guidance Automation Extensions on Steroids

by David Hayden

I mentioned earlier how the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Group came out with the Guidance Automation Toolkit ( GAT ) to help with building code generation and automation within Visual Studio. The Microsoft Patterns and Practices Group uses the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions as the foundation for their software factories.

The Web Service Software Factory shows off the power of the Guidance Automation Extensions through the use of two guidance automation packages:

ASMX guidance package. This guidance package helps build the service interface, the messages the service will expose and consume, and the translators that map these messages to domain model entities.
Data Access guidance package. This guidance package helps build business entities from and existing data model, build stored procedures from a data model, and generate the repository classes and factories that comprise the data access logic.

Here is a short description of the Web Service Software Factory from Microsoft:

"The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.

If you are an architect or developer responsible for building service-based applications, the patterns & practices team would like to invite you to learn how the Service Factory can help your future service development activities. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include:

Designing messages and service interfaces.
Applying exception shielding and handling.
Designing business entities in the domain model.
Translating messages to and from business entities.
Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer.
Planning for the migration to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)."

You owe yourself to check out the Web Service Software Factory as the guidance packages are extremely useful and show off the power of the Guidance Automation Extensions. Download the Web Service Software Factory from here.

Written By: David Hayden ( ASP.NET C# SQL Server Developer )

Filed: Web Service Software Factory, Guidance Automation Toolkit, RAD Code Generation

Code Generation and Automation in Visual Studio - Guidance Automation Toolkit

Dave Hayden — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:57:00 GMT

Code Generation and Automation in Visual Studio - Guidance Automation Toolkit

by David Hayden ( .NET Developer )

Code Generation, O/R Mappers, and .NET productivity tools are a huge factor in developing maintainable .NET and ASP.NET Applications in Visual Studio.

When talking about code generation specifically in Visual Studio, I often use a combination of the following:

Code Snippets and “Live” Templates: You can use the code snippets functionality in Visual Studio 2005 for inserting code fragments as well as live templates from visual studio add-ins like Developer Express CodeRush or JetBrains ReSharper. This essentially helps you reduce the amount of keystrokes while you type custom code in your .NET Applications.
Visual Studio Templates: You can customize existing templates within Visual Studio or make new templates that can help you generate custom items or whole solutions: See the following tutorials:

Code Generation Tools: One can used specific code generation tools to help with repetitive tasks. CodeSmith is one I use often. For database specific code generation, I typically use a custom code generation tool I use internally which I thought I had talked about more on my blog. Here is a snippet on it, but it has gotten pretty functional:

Database Explorer and Code Generator - Stored Procedures and SqlConnectionStringBuilder

This is all a huge time saver, but the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Group has come out with an even better solution - Guidance Automation Toolkit.

Per the website:

“ The Guidance Automation Toolkit consists of a series of elements that work together to provide automation functionality, including:

Recipes - Recipes automate activities that developers would usually perform manually, often by following a series of instructions. You can use recipes to ensure that repetitive and often error-prone activities are performed in a consistent manner and to simplify complex or repetitive development tasks. Recipes can be run on particular solution elements, or on a group of solution elements that share certain characteristics (for example, all C# projects).
Actions - Actions are atomic units of work called in a defined sequence by recipes. The sequence is specified in the recipe definition. An action accepts input either from arguments that have been gathered by the calling recipes or from output received from an action run earlier in the sequence. Recipe actions are specified in the recipe definition.
Text Template Transformation Templates - A Text Template Transformation template consists of a combination of text and scriptlets. Scriptlets are expressions in Visual Basic or C# that when run, return a string that is directly inserted into the output stream of the template. Templates are expanded by the Text Template Transformation engine included with the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Text is inserted unmodified into the template output.
Wizards - Wizards are value gathering strategies used to gather values from recipe arguments. Any recipe can have a wizard associated with it. A wizard walks the developer through one or more steps, which are displayed as pages of the wizard.
Type Converters - Type converters validate the value of a field and convert them from their user interface representation to a type representation.
Visual Studio Templates - Visual Studio templates are written in XML and are used by Visual Studio to create solutions or add one or more projects or items to an existing solution. The templates are expanded by the Visual Studio template engine. Using the Guidance Automation Toolkit, you can associate Visual Studio templates with recipes. This association means that when a template is unfolded, the wizard extension calls the recipe to let it collect parameter values (arguments) for the expansion and then, after the template is unfolded, to execute actions that may further transform solution items created by the template. “

If you are big into automation and code generation and interested in the future of code generation from a Microsoft perspective, I highly recommend looking into the Guidance Automation Toolkit and the T4 Template Language. I will provide some examples of using the GAT in the near future.

Posted By: David Hayden ( .NET Developer )

Filed: Guidance Automation Toolkit