Software Factories

New T4 Template Visual Studio Editor.

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:31:18 GMT

During this past month I've been working in a new T4 template editor as a part of the SFT.

If you're working with dsl or gax you already know, how the editor looks when you try to edit a text template file, it looks like this:

So now you can have a fully colorized text editor for your T4 templates like the ASP.NET Vs editor and you can get it now downlaoding the ClariuS Software Factories Toolkit here.

Colorizing, Intellisense and Validation

In this release it's providing colorizing and intellisense for the T4 statements, like directives, class features and blocks. Regarding the directives you have intellisense for all well known directives and its properties and values.

One interesting feature is for those the well known properties which represents a type, the intellisense gives a complete list of the current project types including its references.

Validation

Like the ASP.NET editor you have a real time document validation.

Preview Transformation

One useful feature is the possibility to run a template transformation in design time, basically as you know, there are two common contexts to run t4 templates, that's a DSLTools Host and GAX Host. When you use the GAX host, most probably you use properties, so you can specify those properties values through the editor property window.

If you want to use complex types you can specify in the property declaration an UITypeEditor and a TypeConverter if it's needed.

So to run the transformation you just have to specify some values for the properties and run the preview transformation commands, which is located at top of solution explorer or in the editor context menu. After running the transformation you get a temp file with the output. If you've specified the ouput extension directive the temp file will have that extension, that's useful so that so to instantiate the proper Vs editor for that output file.

The transformation could fail for different reasons, if the transformation fails when the template is compiled you'll get those errors into visual studio error list, however if the transformation fails after the compilation and when the template is running you'll get the errors in a temp output file.

Debugging

Unfortunately, in this version the editor does not have debug yet, however in the meantime you can check the Garethj's Blog, there he has a post of how you can debug a template. I hope we could include this feature on future versions.

What's coming

We're working in one important feature which is supporting intellisense and colorizing for the embedded language like you already have in the ASP.NET editor.

You can try it now, download the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit from here.

Enjoy.

Recipe Designer and SFT June CTP

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:29:48 GMT

Today we shipped the June CTP of the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit, which includes a new version of the Recipe Designer. The main change what I've been working on, is the serialization behavior in order to support round tripping, beside that was an interesting opportunity to work implementing a custom serialization in a Dsl.

So now if you change the .xml extension of the recipe definition file with .recipe extension, you'll get a graphical representation of your recipe, the only constraint that it has is that it is not supporting XInclude.

Key features

Round tripping: Now you can edit your recipe using the default xml editor as usual maintaining the synchronization with the designer with no extra work.

Improved User Experience: Simplest new ToolBox. Now you basically have two connectors, one to connect arguments with wizard fields or action properties and another to define the flow between actions and between pages. Also the shapes includes useful information like the friendly type name and in the case of arguments if it's required or not

Main manifest syncronization: if the recipe definition is well formed, you'll get an xinclude of your recipe in the main manifest file. Also if the recipe already has a unbounded reference, it will be added in the BindingRecipe recipe.

Configurable Attributes Support: You can define in the designer view all your configurable attributes in any element that support it, like actions, valueproviders, etc.

We're working on the next release of Software Factories Toolkit, your comments, suggestions and bug reports are welcome. You can give your feedback through SFT Forums.
http://softwarefactoriestoolkit.net/forums.aspx

Download Software Factories Toolkit Here.

ClariuS Software Factories Toolkit June CTP is out!.

Jose Escrich — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:28:28 GMT

The Software Factories Toolkit June CTP is finally out and the key improvements in this release are:

- Recipe Designer with a redesigned user experiencie and round tripping support, so it could uses the .xml recipe files as is.

- T4 Templates Editor, an useful editor with colorizing, intellisense and support to preview transformation in design time.

- Multi package setup wizard, a recipe which generate a wix setup project with all the package contained in a solution. The most interesting thing here, is that you don't have to create differente setup project for each of your package any more. Now you can create a unified wix project, which could contain two or more guidance package and dsl tools packages. Get more information about this new feature in the Adrian's Blog.

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- Dsl Recipe Binder, now you can specify bindings to recipes just doing a right click on your dsl designer surface and choossing a reference where the recipes will apply.

You can check the Victor's blog, there you will find an overview of the new features included in this drop.

You can get the latest SFT version here.

Guidance Automation Extensions Febreary CTP is finally Out!

Jose Escrich — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:46:00 GMT

Some weeks delayed but is finally out!, this new Febrary 2007 CTP basically has support for Vista and includes another minor bug fixes. The most relevant bug fixes are the follow:

Support for Windows Vista
Guidance Navigator performance and display improvements
Handling of read-only .gpstate files
Use of standard system colors in wizards and dialogs
Fixes to registration recipes

Tom has published a detailed description of this new release here.

Download the new GAX Feb 2007 CTP here.

DSL Tools: how to change the size, position and order of the swimlanes.

Jose Escrich — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:39:00 GMT

There are an easily way to change the position, size and order of the swimlane shapes in your dsl. To do that, you just have to create a partial class of the swimlane that you want to modify its boundary and then override its BoundRules property, like this:

Also you must create the BoundRules custom class and override the GetCompliantBounds method which returns the rectangle in which the swimlane will be painted. This method receives the shape and the proposed rectangle, with those values you can alter any of that as you wish.

Specifying the rectangle you be able to change the location X,Y and also the size of that swimlane.

Enjoy.

Web Service Software Factory on MSDN Magazine

Jose Escrich — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:26:00 GMT

Aaron Skonnard published an article on MSDN Magazine in which gives an overview about the WSSF version 2 and all the related things of this version. You can check the post here.

Aaron also published on this past december and another article about WSSF V1 (ASMX) here.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/02/Ser...