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Software Factories Toolkit


A colleague of mine mailed me today saying I really needed to check out http://www.softwarefactoriestoolkit.net

SFT is a free product, well actually it’s still a , from Clarius Consulting. Clarius Consulting is helping the Microsoft Corporation for a while now with it’s Software Factories Vision. Although Microsoft already released several technologies/products to empower this vision it’s clarius’s goal to make it much easier to create your own software factory using the Gax & DSL technology. This is actually a whole step forward. I remember attending a Visug event here in Belgium that was about Guidance Automation Toolkit. The thing that was stopping me from diving into this was the complexity of creating a custom guidance package.

Another plus is the support for VB.NET. Most software packages that are being released come in C#. Sometimes there’s a vb version available, but you won’t see this often.

Using scripting you can make your own recipe. The scripting is much easier for a developer because he (or maybe she?) can write the code. It’s up to the scripting engine to make sure the right things happen. Granted that your code is accurate ofcourse :-)

When I went to the site I looked at the videos, but I have to say that the quality of contents is just bad. The presenter is not used to giving presentations I think and the sound is also not optimal. After 1,5 video’s I got so annoyed I stopped watching them.

Maybe I’ll try this “SFT stuff” later on, but for now I’ll wait and see how the community will react to this. 

A short feature list:

    • Eases integration between GAX  and DSL Tools, providing several assets to make your guidance packages and DSL designers work togheter seamsly without effort .
    • Provides plenty of automated guidance for creating your own Guidance Packages, starting with real world and customizable solution templates.
    • Adds full support for VB.Net developers.
    • Fixes several well-known GAX issues and bugs.
    • Adds GAX support for Scripting and Eventing.
    • Uses the much  better WiX setup technology over VS Setup projects, proving support for generating both, setup and merge modules for your guidance packages. 
    • Base library offering stock assets ready to use covering VS, DSL, TFS, WWF and other technologies.
      Includes several sample guidance packages demonstrating the usage of the different offered features.

This entry was posted on 20/12/2006, 13:30 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.