Visual Studio Architecture Tooling Guidance – How important is the guidance extension?

The Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance has been quite a popular Rangers out-of-band and guidance project, holding the fourth place in terms of overall popularity (measured in average downloads per day) at the moment. It therefore comes at no surprise that this project is also a proud member of the  Visual Studio 11 Readiness “Gig” (Understanding our Visual Studio 11 Readiness conspiracy), with an exciting set of Epics and a question around the guidance extension part.

The Team

First let me introduce the most important piece of the project puzzle, the team:

Name	Project Role	Optional bio
Jean-Marc Prieur	Product Owner
Francisco Fagas	Project Lead
Larry Guger	Subject Matter Expert (SME)	Larry is a Product Manager on the Visual Studio Ultimate team.  He comes from a background in consulting to Enterprise customers helping them develop robust applications using Microsoft technologies and Agile development practices.
Brian Blackman	Ruck Master
Willy-Peter Schaub	Mentor, Support
Eric Golpe	Contributor	Eric Golpe is a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services.  He is a cloud-computing subject matter expert with our Enterprise Strategy Worldwide Windows Azure Team, focusing on implementing large-scale cloud architectures with our Microsoft customers.
Gaurav Aggarwal	Contributor
David A. Clark	Contributor
Raul Guerrero Carreon	Contributor

We are missing quite a few pictures … we will use the friendly caveman as a temporary placeholder.

Jean-Marc	Francisco	Larry	Brian	Willy	Eric	Gaurav	David	Raul

The “Epics”

The Epics have been refined and prioritized as follows:

• Epic: I would like to understand the changes of Dev11 on the Visual Studio ALM architecture tooling
• Epic: Create practical guidance on how to customize DGML graphs
• Epic: I would like Link elements to slides, Word, files, diagrams
• Epic: Exchange UML diagrams created with Visual Studio with other vendor tooling
• Epic: Use the architecture tooling to design Windows Phone solution
• Epic: Use DSLs for generate program code, configuration files, and other artefacts
• Epic: Update RangersArchitectureGuidance.vsix

Would you like to see more detail on one or more Epics? If yes, please ping me!

The Question

As you can see we have highlighted the last Epic in red … why? It is currently de-prioritised for v2 of the Visual Studio 11 Readiness, because we have a dependency on Feature Builder, which is not yet available for Visual Studio 11.

How important is guidance extension to you? Is it acceptable that we have beamed it down the priority list to v2? Your candid feedback will be most appreciated!