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New Video: How To - Personalize Team System Guidance with Guidance Explorer

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If you are a hunter and gatherer of guidance, you'll want Guidance Explorer.  Watch Video: How To - Personalize Team System Guidance with Guidance Explorer to see how you can use Guidance Explorer to build a custom collection of guidance from our Visual Studio Team System Guidance project.  If you haven't used Guidance Explorer before, or it's been a while, you're in for a surprise.  Seriously.

Guidance Explorer is a free tool to help you browse, find, organize, or even create your own guidance. When you launch Guidance Explorer, it synchronizes with our online store.  For example, today's additions include a number of brand new Team System guidance items:

My favorite Guidance Explorer features include:

  • Create collections of your favorite guidance (custom views)
  • Browse by checklists, code examples, how tos, guidelines (view by type)
  • Filter for just security, performance or Team System (Filter by technology, topic or category)
  • Share guidance among your teams (UNC share scenario)
  • Build a customized guide or whitepaper on the fly with exactly the parts you want (Save to Word, HTML or XML)
  • Create new guidance libraries and write your own personal guidance or checklists.

Keep in mind that Guidance Explorer is actually a diamond in the rough.  It has its flaws, but it also has unique powers.  For example, I could use Guidance Explorer to inform you of brand new, emerging security practices.  I could also flag the top performance issues using the priority field.  Imagine the alternative of hunting through a whitepaper or article, instead of organized collections and lists of actionable, guidance nuggets.

I know consultants that literally save themselves many hours per week by using Guidance Explorer as a personal knowledge base and for tailoring guidance for customers.  I also know of customers using Guidance Explorer as a light-weight and effective way to share guidance among their development teams.  It's actually the type of tool where customers surprise me what they use it for.

While Guidance Explorer has nearly 1100 guidance nuggets at last count (across security, performance and .NET 1.1. and 2.0), you can quickly shrink the haystacks to find the needle that you need (Ed and I call this our Shrinking Haystack pattern).  You can also discover relationships among the guidance, because related items are linked.  Don't take my word for it though, test drive it for yourself.  Did I mention it's free?  Oh yeah, I should also mention it comes with source, so shape it to your heart's content.

Go ahead and watch Video: How To - Personalize Team System Guidance with Guidance Explorer and then download Guidance Explorer.  If you do use Guidance Explorer and you have a story you'd like to share, please leave a comment in this post.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2007
    Last year, I blogged a few times about a CodePlex project J.D. Meier was working on called Guidance Explorer

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2007
    I downloaded the latest version (build 9) from CodePlex but when I try to synchronize with the library I get an error: "Synchronization can't connect to the online store" GuidanceExplorer.exe.config contains         <value>http://209.34.241.10/net20/OnlineStorage.asmx</value> Any idea what I'm doing wrong ? Thahks

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2007
    We have added an FAQ that might help the "Synchronization" issue: http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/GuidanceLibrary.GEFAQ015

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2007
    Guidance Explorer is not only very powerful security (and performance) guidance tool - recently it met

  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2007
    J.D. Meier on New Video: How To - Personalize Team System Guidance with Guidance Explorer. Aaron Hallberg...

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
    If you are looking to create customized Visual Studio Team System Guidance, then you should absolutely

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2007
    J.D. Meier's Blog is a great resource on VSTS and team based development. Some recent posts are: Guidance

  • Anonymous
    October 06, 2007
    Guidance Explorer is not only very powerful security (and performance) guidance tool - recently it met

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2007
    You can build your own guide using Guidance Explorer . Guidance Explorer is a front-end browser optimized

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2007
    You can build your own guide using Guidance Explorer . Guidance Explorer is a front-end browser optimized