Don Smith hinted at it and Hernan de Lahitte gave a little more detail about it, but boy was I surprised at the“Patterns and Practices for Designing Service Oriented Applications — An Illustrated Example” PDC pre-con session. The guys over at PAG (aka Patterns & Practices) create a Guidance Automation Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005 which is describe as:
Using the patterns & practices of the 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 can be used with assets developed in-house or by third parties; such as the assets created by the Microsoft patterns & practices team. These assets can be exposed to developers within Visual Studio, and in some cases, configured by using configuration files, templates, and wizards.
WS-BAT (Web Services Baseline Architecture Toolkit) is guidance tool developed by the PAG that helps you build web services according to the PAG best practices. What this means is that instead of trying to train my project teams on the “proper” way to structure .Net web services projects, I can hand this off to them, and it will help guide them. The only (slight) gripe I had was that WS-BAT didn’t create Unit Test projects (NUnit or VSTS), but that can be fixed. WS-BAT hasn’t been released yet. The version they demoed only does Contract First styled web services, but they’d like to also let you do Code First. I don’t really care which way you develop your web services, as long as you think Message First.
I can see creating GAT packages for all sorts of design patterns, from my Data Access Layer, to Domain Driven Design, to Exception Patterns. The only issue right now with GAT is that the public version only works on VS 2005 Beta2, not Release Canadite 1 that was distributed at the PDC. I’d love to develop a Code Camp session or 2 around GAT.