After lots and lots of hard work I'm very proud to announce that my team shipped v1.0 of the Clarius T4 Editor today. We've been insanely struggling to get the bits finished during the last few months; you know, extending Visual Studio for simple stuff is far from trivial let alone extending it in some...

For all of you out there working on Software Factories or just automating Visual Studio using GAX/GAT we've put up a small tool named GAX Troubleshooter (yes, we didn't spend much time on naming it). Upgrading versions of GAX, installing and uninstalling guidance packages has been usually a bit of pain...

The DSL Tools are a huge improvement towards getting a VS designer up and running in no time. They make a good job of keeping you abstracted at a 10,000ft view from the inner workings of a Visual Studio designer. You drag and drop shapes all around, defining your domain model and its graphical representation...

Let’s do a 15 seconds recap on what currently GAX/GAT and DSL Tools offer regarding deployment. GAT : uses Visual Studio Setup projects (can you feel the pain already?) to deploy your custom guidance packages. If you don’t need anything beyond the very simply basics this setup will work nice even if...

If you have ever worked with GAX/GAT and/or the DSL Tools chances are that you had to look at existing templates and maybe customize them or create your own. Currently none of these two technologies offers you any remedies for the pain that is browsing and editing these templates with a “plain-text”...

Before you even mention this… yes… it’s March already… I’m proud to announce that one week after the GAX February 2007 CTP release (aka v1.2) we are making available our Clarius Software Factories Toolkit February 2007 CTP that is compatible with the new GAX version....

For the last couple of months the SFT Team at Clarius has been working hard to get the first Clarius Software Factories Toolkit CTP bits out of the door for the community to have an early peek. We’re aiming at making the Clarius SFT a must have companion for the Microsoft Software Factories platform...

I've been re-reading this post from Sikin Joseph for most of the afternoon. ...I got it into my head that I should "Always program to an interface not an implementation" . So whenever I needed to create a new class/abstraction I used to start of with an interface IThis, IThat etc. over...

Some interesting tidbits From Ted Neward's blog : At the patterns&practices Summit in Redmond, I was on a webcasted panel, "Open Source in the Enterprise" , moderated by Scott Hanselman and included myself, Rocky Lhotka , and Chris Sells as panelists. Part of the discussion came around...

Steve posted his concerns over software factories and the YAGNI factor. ("You Ain't Gonna Need It") My concern with Software Factories is that the output from these procedures are chock full of code that you're not going to need, but are included in the mix because that's how the...