Announcing the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 (Preview)

It’s been nearly a year since I posted this: “Since February, I … have [started] spending my time working more closely with the Visual Studio team and am looking forward to seeing what comes from that collaboration. ”

Today, I am finally able to talk about what I’ve been doing since last February:  the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010!

Feature Builder is a completely re-thought implementation of the automated guidance + tools + templates work I’ve been doing for nearly 6 years here at Microsoft.  Some of you may remember Project “Glidepath” and the two versions of Blueprints which were released between 2006 and 2009.  Feature Builder tops them all in terms of functionality, integration within Visual Studio and most importantly product group alignment.

Working directly with the Visual Studio Architecture Team (from whom this release originates), I’ve had the pleasure of participating in a serious effort to turn conceptual theory and 5 years of “incubation” within DPE into something very cool: product group power tool bits!

I’ll be posting hints-and-tips as well as keeping the Feature Builder FAQ post up-to-date during this preview period.

For an overview of the Feature Builder and step-by-step screencast how-to walkthroughs, head over to Channel9 where you’ll be able to find all things Feature Builder:  https://channel9.msdn.com/tags/FeatureBuilder

Note: What we are releasing today is a “preview” which requires Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) and the Visual Studio SDK for RC. Bits compatible with VS2010 RTM will be available later.