Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 1 A Deep Dive Into The Guidance Automation Toolkit Jelle Druyts Compuware.NET Consultant

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 2 Have you ever needed... A 40-page document full of guidelines Architectural layers, solution/project structure Namespaces, class names, method names,... Best practices, step-by-step instructions Visual Studio customizations Custom actions, menu items, toolbar buttons,... Custom “Add New” items (classes, projects, solutions) Advanced automation Wizards Code generation Quick-start solutions for development teams Custom Software Factory development More time to write interesting code?

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 3 Goals You will learn What GAT is, what it can and cannot do Best practices for GAT development How GAT fits into the Software Factories vision You will be able to Recognize opportunities for GAT Implement solutions with GAT Sit back while it does your work

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 4 Agenda Visual Studio Extensibility Guidance Automation Toolkit GAT Best Practices GAT & Software Factories

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 5 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity VISUAL STUDIO EXTENSIBILITY A look at the available extensibility features in Visual Studio

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 6 Visual Studio Templates Project & Item templates Reusable and customizable project and item stubs “New Project” and “Add New Item” dialog boxes Accelerate the development process Easy deployment: just a.zip file Content files: source code files, embedded resources, project files,... Metadata stored in a “.vstemplate” file (XML) Copy to a predefined folder (local or on the network) Capabilities are limited (templates are “dumb”)

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 7 Visual Studio SDK Visual Studio has an object model Call the Visual Studio API’s directly Use EnvDTE.dll and EnvDTE80.dll Powerful Entire Visual Studio object model is exposed Difficult Registering custom packages in Visual Studio COM interop with EnvDTE object model

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 8 Guidance Automation Toolkit Guidance Automation Make reusable code and pattern assets available in Visual Studio Integrate reusable code into applications Guide developers through complex procedures Built upon Visual Studio SDK Roadmap Latest release: February 2007 CTP Will be included in a future release of the Visual Studio Built and used by Microsoft patterns & practices Used extensively in their various “Software Factories” Free download (source code not available)

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 9 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity GUIDANCE AUTOMATION TOOLKIT A deep dive into the various elements of GAT

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 10 GAT & GAX Guidance Automation Toolkit Guidance Automation Extensions Design-time Authoring of guidance packages Required for guidance package authors Runtime Execution of guidance packages Required for all developers

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 11 Guidance Life Cycle

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 12 Guidance Automation Packages A Guidance Package is Authored for a specific purpose A unit of deployment and versioning A Guidance Package consists of Visual Studio Templates Guidance Automation Recipes The “Guidance Package” meta package A quick-start solution for Guidance Packages Generates project structure & sample code Generates setup project to build MSI

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 13 A First Look At The Enterprise Library Guidance Package

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 14 Visual Studio Templates Provide integration with Visual Studio “Create New Project/Item” dialog box Defined in.vstemplate files (XML) Expanded by the Visual Studio template engine Associate Visual Studio Templates with recipes Select TemplateGAT calls Recipe Wizard collects arguments Template is “unfolded” Actions are executed to further transform solution items

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 15 Visual Studio Templates <VSTemplate Version="2.0" Type="ProjectGroup" xmlns=" Application Block Guidance Package that creates a new Application Block. CSharp ApplicationBlock.ico Projects\Runtime\Runtime.vstemplate Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio, Version= , Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio.Templates.UnfoldTemplate <Template xmlns=" SchemaVersion="1.0" Recipe="CreateApplicationBlock">

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 16 Visual Studio Templates

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 17 Guidance Automation Recipes A recipe is a fancy word for a wizard Automated activity as a series of instructions Abstracts something a developer would need to do manually E.g. create projects, add references,... Ensures that repetitive (error-prone) activities are performed in a consistent manner Simplifies complex or repetitive development tasks Defined in an XML file in the root of the project Referenced by a Visual Studio Template Recipe gets run when template is “unfolded”

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 18 Guidance Automation Recipes <GuidancePackage xmlns=" Name="JelleDruyts.EnterpriseLibraryGuidance" Caption="Enterprise Library Guidance" Description="Provides guidance around the creation of Application Blocks" Guid="2cac5b9c-a04f-4a49-8a56-3ee5d63bd83f" SchemaVersion="1.0"> Create a new Enterprise Library Application Block <Converter Type="Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library.Converters. CodeIdentifierStringConverter, Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library" /> <Converter Type="Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library.Converters. NamespaceStringConverter, Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library" /> Application Block Information <Field ValueName="ApplicationBlockName" Label="Application Block Name" InvalidValueMessage="Must be a valid.NET identifier." /> <Field ValueName="ApplicationBlockNamespace" Label="Namespace" InvalidValueMessage="Must be a valid.NET namespace identifier." />

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 19 Wizards Value gathering strategies Gather values for recipe arguments Walk the developer through one or more steps Any recipe can have a wizard associated with it

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 20 Value Providers Provide values for recipe arguments Optionally dependant of other recipe arguments Define project names, post-build commands,... Retrieve currently selected project, file,... Special guest: ExpressionEvaluatorValueProvider Regular.NET classes (pre-built & custom) <ValueProvider Type="Evaluator" Expression="$(ApplicationBlockNamespace).$(ApplicationBlockName)">

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 21 Type Converters Validate the value of a field CodeIdentifierStringConverterNamespaceStringConverter... Convert UI fields to a type representation Regular.NET classes (pre-built & custom) <Converter Type="Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library.Converters. CodeIdentifierStringConverter, Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library" />

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 22 Actions Atomic units of work called in a defined sequence by recipes E.g. add project references, generate classes, add project items,... Strongly-typed input and output arguments Come from the recipe or from another action (chaining) Typically use EnvDTE Regular.NET classes (pre-built & custom)

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 23 Looking Into The Enterprise Library Guidance Package

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 24 Code Generation T4 templates (Text Templates Transformation Toolkit) Combination of text and scriptlets (C#/VB.NET expressions) E.g. generate data access component from database,... ASP.NET-like syntax with full capabilities of.NET using System; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common.Configuration; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Configuration.Design; namespace { internal sealed class : ConfigurationNode { }

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 25 Continuous Guidance Recipes stay “alive” Recipes associated with project items E.g. right-click data access project, choose “Add Data Access Component” Adding more templates New projects, e.g. data access project New project items, e.g. data access component Uses same mechanisms (wizards, actions,...)

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 26 Guidance Navigator Separate window listing Overview information All the available recipes History of executed recipes Links to online help, documentation,...

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 27 Other GAT Artifacts Custom Wizard Pages Add custom user controls to the wizard Type Editors Edit values in a wizard through a custom UI Snippets Visual Studio snippets that are automatically deployed

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 28 Code Generation in the Enterprise Library Guidance Package

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 29 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity GAT BEST PRACTICES A look at some development best practices around GAT

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 30 When (Not) To Use GAT Use GAT when You have a specific problem with a specific solution that Is automatable Must be executed multiple times Has a development time or risk that is too high to do manually You can’t use “dumb” Visual Studio Templates You want to prepare for building a Software Factory Do not use GAT when You will use the Guidance Package only once – ever You can’t/don’t want to invest time in the learning curve You just think it’s cool

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 31 Authoring Guidance Packages There is a learning curve Do not involve everyone Make 1 person/team responsible for GAT Once the knowledge is there, investment pays off quickly Don’t try to build everything at once Start automating simple scenarios Incrementally increase complexity Add templates, logic and guidance along the way

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 32 GAT & Source Control Guidance Package “state” is kept in a.gpState file (XML) with the solution file (.sln) Indicates which Guidance Packages are associated with the solution Contains recipe references and some state Can/should be checked in to Source Control

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 33 Guidance Package State Guidance Packages are “stateless” Recipe arguments (wizard fields) aren’t available after the wizard finished Store values out-of-band (e.g. to disk, database,...) Lookup values dynamically in solution if possible (through Visual Studio SDK, e.g. default namespace) The generated code is the “model” DSLs can fill this gap

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 34 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity GAT & SOFTWARE FACTORIES A look at the big picture

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 35 Software Factories Initiative developed by Microsoft patterns & practices Web Service SF-Web Client SF Smart Client SF-Mobile Client SF Current state: infancy Written documentation + Guidance Packages + Reference Implementations GAT mostly used for wizards & code generation The code is the “model” The road ahead: towards the Grand Vision Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) capture and persist the model Programming code becomes a “rendering” of the model GAT guides developers through complex tasks

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 36 A Possible Future (EFx)

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 37 GAT & Software Factories Software Factory enabling technologies: Visual Studio Extensibility Model Visual Studio Modeling Tools (Designers) Domain Specific Language Tools (DSLs) Small, highly focused languages that model and solve clearly identifiable problems Guidance Automation Toolkit Generate initial solution structure Wizards & code generation Can be used to provide guidance and context to DSLs Launch recipes from shapes in the DSLs Enable DSLs in certain parts of the solution

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 38 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity IN CLOSING Wrapping up...

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 39 Key Points GAT is the next step in Visual Studio automation Builds on Visual Studio Templates & Visual Studio SDK GAT can help you Automate repetitive tasks and complex processes Provide guidance right inside the Visual Studio solution Generate code with the powerful T4 engine Provide context and guidance continuously Make sure guidelines and best practices are enforced Be lazy Be lazy GAT is a key part of Software Factories Understand the present Prepare for the future

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 40 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity Resources Guidance Automation Toolkit Home Forum Community site My Guidance Automation series Software Factories Home Guidance Automation Toolkit and Domain-Specific Language Tools for Visual Studio 2005: Integration Scenarios EFx Clarius Software Factories Toolkit Microsoft Microsoft patterns & practices: Enterprise Library 2.0:

Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity - 41 Satisfy Your Technical Curiosity Thank You! Thanks for your attention I'll be happy to answer all your questions Right after the session Compuware Booth Community Booth: Ask-The-Experts VISUG Booth

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