A semi-important event transpired last week that almost didn't get any press from the blogging community or anyone else for that matter. I might just have missed the news since I was a little stressed last week, and if it wasn't for a fluke coincidence I probably still wouldn’t have known about it. “So what is this important event you talk of?” I hear you ask. Well, the event was the release of the final version 1.4 of the Patterns & Practices’ GAX/GAT tools. If you don’t know what either GAX or GAT are, here is the 10 second description.
“GAX” stands for “Guidance Automation eXtensions” and “GAT” stands for “Guidance Automation Toolkit”. These are a set of plug-ins and tools by the Patterns & Practices group in Microsoft for Visual Studio that enables you (the architect or senior developer) to write guidance packages for your development team. “GAX” enables the developer to use/execute the guidance packages while “GAT” enables you to actually develop them.
To read more about what guidance packages are, I'll direct you to the P&P site, which also have the download links for the new version of GAX/GAT.
The highlights of this GAX/GAT release are:
1. It’s final... This is important because all the previous versions of GAX/GAT have been labeled “Beta” or “CTP”. However, the details about what this change in labeling actually means are still a little sketchy. Will MS commit to the product or how should we interpret this “Final” label? However I think it is probably for the better. I mean, It's always rather difficult to sell a CTP or Beta solution to my boss, even though a "CTP" or "Beta", in P&P terms, is probably as good as any product most companies would ship.
2. It now supports both VS2005 and VS2008.
3. Various bug fixes.
“That doesn't sound like much... So what’s all the fuzz about?” you ask. Well, apart from GAX/GAT being a very powerful and interesting concept, the release of version 1.4 enables another even more interesting project to be completed. Namely the Web Client Software Factory 2.0. This project hasn’t been able to ship, due to some issues in GAX/GAT. But now the problems are solved and WCSF 2.0 is just around the corner according to Glenn Block from the P&P group. The latest news on Glenn’s blog was that WCSF 2.0 is shipping sometime this week!!!
If you don’t know what the WCSF project is all about and why I think this is important news, I strongly encourage you to check out the WCSF CodePlex site. I also encourage you to check out the other software factories such as the “Web Service Software Factory” or the “Smart Client Software Factory”.
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