Guidance Automation Toolkit

Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) is the latest deliverable from patterns & practices. Congratulations to the team!

Have you ever explored the extensibilty features in Visual Studio? Have you tried Enterprise Templates? do you use code generation techniques in your environment? do you write wizards that streamline your developers experience? GAT is for you.

Released last week, it's something I've waited anxiously for years! The first code generator I wrote (many years ago) was a VB6 application that connected to a mainframe, got the metadata of services from there, and based on that metadata generated the classes and code necesary to use those services. Pretty cool stuff, with just a few clicks it created all the plumbing to connect to the mainframe, marshall parameters from the VB world into the COBOL COMMAREA, called the CICS transaction, unpacked the results into VB classes' properties, converting data from EBCDIC to ASCII. Since it was metadata driven, dev intervention was minimal (only to adjust tricky REDEFINES). It yielded a number of VB friendly classes that compared to all the mid$, left$, right$ mess (not to mention the connectivity code) was absolutely great. It was a simple tool, yet we demonstrated the power of tools like these.

My second experience was with MBI code generator. This one was indeed integrated into Visual Studio.NET and was a very simple wizard that used a template approach for code generation using VS.NET generic wizard engine. (yes, that one that uses HTML, jscript and Harry Potter's wand). Again, simple, it proved the value of the approach. Many of our customers took that and extended it further to include their own guidelines in their dev process, automating recurring tasks.

And of course there are the EDRA wizards. ALl these are based on a prototype of GAT.

Quoting Tom:

"Using Guidance Automation Toolkit, you can make reusable code and pattern assets directly available in Visual Studio 2005.

The toolkit is designed to simplify integrating reusable code into applications allowing architects to automate development activities that developers would usually have to perform manually; often by following a series of instructions. By using the toolkit, architects can also ensure that repetitive and often error-prone activities are performed in a consistent manner, streamlining and accelerating the development process.

The toolkit will be used to improve the user experience around future patterns & practices deliverables, and can also be used with guidance assets developed by customers or partners. These assets can be exposed to developers within Visual Studio, and in some cases, configured by using configuration files, templates, and wizards.

The Guidance Automation Toolkit is being positioned as a part of the emerging Software Factories initiative, alongside related deliverables such as the Domain Specific Languages Tools. Being an emerging space, we anticipate GAT to continue to evolve based on community feedback and future platform direction."

Where to get it? here, or better yet; you can watch a recorded webcast of GAT here.

A couple of days ago Wojtek (GAT's Architect) helped me build my first GAT package for CAB. I still need to polish it a little bit, but in one hour or so it was working: created all the skeleton, references, basic eventing, etc. of a simple CAB app (the GPS example). Very cool. We plan to extensively use GAT for CAB.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 15, 2005
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• Anonymous
  May 17, 2005
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• Anonymous
  July 02, 2008
  Please provide some more information...Thanku