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”...

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...

We just released the June 2007 CTP of our Clarius SFT including some new cool features to help in shortening the existing gap between current Software Factories-related technologies, like GAX/GAT and DSL Tools. This toolkit will help you in getting things done today . It contains features that will abstract...

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...

Back in 2001 I used to know the ASP.NET bits from top to bottom getting to its internal (thanks Reflector!) to a very down-to-the-metal level. I could recite the page lifecycle from top of my head, tell you what you may being doing wrong regarding it without actually looking at your code (my 4000+ posts...

What is the hardcore way of extending Visual Studio: VSIP. And what are the first things that come to mind when you think of “VSIP”: expensive and obscure . Expensive because it used to be 10k/year and obscure because its COM roots and it’s very poor (close to inexistent) documentation. You tell me how...

The announcement at TechEd 07 seems to have been received well by the blogsphere. For example Pablo is saying “ WOW ... finally extending Visual Studio will be much easier… ”. I’ve to admit, I don’t find this near that exciting, sorry. We have had Visual Studio PPE edition before. And we already had...

Talking about obscure ... Take a quick look at the documentation for IVsTextManager.RegisterView method. The main description for the method reads: " Method information is not provided. " Ok... there isn't much I can guess about the method from that so let's see what the arguments this method takes are...

I remember the time (3 years ago) when I was dogfooding latest ASP.Net bits and entering bugs like hell. I was also publicly posting most of my findings about what I did and didn't like and I always got nothing but a very good reaction from the ASP.Net team which was always open to feedback. Now I'm...

It doesn't have the VS look, it doesn't have the new cool Expression-wave look... nor the Silverlight one... nor the Live one... It is... a..., it is... the new... VSX logo (disclaimer: not closing your eyes at this time may hurt them): I can anticipate some of the promotions that could be run for the...