I wrote an addin for VS that displays a Tool Window to
the user displaying information about web server
utilization. I looked through the GAT documentation and
it does not seem to have anything for helping me create
tool windows, adding information to the Help|About
window, adding pages to Tools|Options to let my users
configure the tool, etc. If Microsoft is killing off add
ins in VS then a lot of my hard work was useless, and if
GAT does not support creating tool windows, etc., then I
cannot even create my tool for a future version.
Pleas tell me that I will be able to do this in future
versions of VS and it is not being killed off!
Hey, I did not mean to imply that GAX will replace the
VS addins. The title of the post, which I changed, was
not ment to be taken literally.
GAT is about building guidance, and a toolwindow like
the one you describe is fine, but does not necessarily
provide guidance. More like providing data, I'd say,
kind of the server explorer, etc. You can still do that,
but GAT will not provide additional features for that
scenario. You have the very powerful VS SDK available to
do that kind of stuff.
That said, GAT integrates fully with the VS SDK, and you
can turn a GAT package into a VS SDK (aka VSIP) package
easily to exploit its full potential.
Add-ins will certainly be around for a long time, for
simpler tasks.
But I found this on the MSDN website, where only the
text "VS Add-ins are dead, part II" was displayed, which
is misleading. Not only that, GAT is not an alternative,
from what I have seen, it is just another technology for
VS. Alternative means I should choose one or the other.
How is a tool built using GAT an alternative when I
cannot build an addin using it, or a package (can I
build a project system or language using GAT)?
Yes, it was misleading, and I'm sorry about that. It was
more of a catchy phrase. I replaced it to be more
meaningful.
Yes, GAT is an alternative to Add-ins, becuase in a lot
of cases add-ins were used to build the kind of
developer task automation that can be done much more
easily with GAT, which also provides a number of
benefits such as deep integration with VS templates and
a code generation engine codenamed T4.
You cannot build an add-in with GAT, as GAT builds VSIP
packages, not add-ins. You can definitely build a
project system or language and layer GAT on top of it.
But you will be using VSIP to do that, and GAT to add
the guidance on top of it. A GAT package is turned into
a full-blown VS SDK package just by adding a class that
inherits from VSPackage and assigning the same guid from
GAT package XML, in the same project. Read Oscar's post
about that to see what I mean:
http://blogs.artinsoft.net/ocalvo/archive/2005/10/22/1006.aspx
So yes, I still believe GAT is an alternative to
add-ins. But it is an alternative when the add-in is
automating guidance and developer use cases (such as
configure security on this app, or create a disconnected
service agent from this web reference kind of thing).
I strongly encourage you to take a look at the new
software factories coming out of p&p to understand
what GAT is capable of.