Update on Microsoft Blueprints

Update to anyone following this entry: We have now released the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 (RTM-Preview) which supercedes and, in very many ways, continues on what we were doing with Blueprints.  

Most of you who read this blog know that for the past 3 years I’ve been driveing a project that was first called Project Glidepath, then Software + Services Blueprints and finally Microsoft Blueprints. 

You may have also noticed recently that the Codeplex project where we were distributing the bits has been closed and wondered what’s up. 

We are making some changes around Blueprints. Blueprints were an important incubation whose purpose was to explore process guidance and automation. They helped us gain a better understanding of requirements for this kind of technology through customer and partner feedback.

Recently, however, we took down the Blueprints project on CodePlex and the Blueprints home page on MSDN. We did this in order to focus on the incubation internally. This work includes determining how best to support process guidance and automation capabilities in a manner aligned with Visual Studio Team System product direction.

Since February, I also have moved from focusing on evangelism to spending my time working more closely with the Visual Studio team and am looking forward to seeing what comes from that collaboration.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2009
  PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/update-on-microsoft-blueprints/

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
  Taking new directions with these things is fine but why would you pull the project from CodePlex? (The MSDN homepage is still there by the way.) This is very sad for the people who've invested time & effort into builiding BPs. It wouldn't hurt to let the BlueprintContrib guys know about it, too.

• Anonymous
  June 09, 2009
  Sad and frustrating news indeed - we'd made a reasonably insignificant investment in adopting Blueprints, so it sounds like that time is wasted now.  Also, given that the project was on CodePlex the source code should have been open source - can Microsoft at least release the source code and let the Community move it forward?

• Anonymous
  June 12, 2009
  Hi Michael. Thanks for the update on the Blueprint factory. I was a little perplexed that I couldn't find it anymore! I really enjoy the technology and have demoed it to my team a few times. We're at the stage of incorporating it into our processes but after seeing your post, I'm a little concerned about the future of Blueprints. Can you give a little more insight into the future? Should we hold off on creating Blueprints until the next iteration of it is release? Thanks!

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2009
  This is late news as I’ve been busy recently, but if you’ve been following Blueprints make sure you read