Software Factories

The Perscriptive Architecture Group publish Design Patterns and Code through Application Blocks

The Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) provides you with the ability to programmatically defined a "wizard" that offers guidance within context into VS 2005

DSL to provide a context specific language for a problem, this generates code that can then be used

Demo given showed:

GAT generated Wizards to defined
a) UI linked with UI Processes
b) Business Process hooks with links to things like Service Agents for Cacheing

The demo was pretty poor, lots of code, lots of cutting and pasting. I was hoping more on the theory of Software Factories, the use of DSL's, and the support for SOA and MDA architectures.

Never mind, some stuff to look into. Jason Smallman has started some work on a "helper" then defined the framework for projects, linking in code for design patterns that have previously been developed. As I see it, the GAT and some development work would replace this bespoke tool with something that would hook into VS 2005 . It woud offer the same features, "I want to build an n-Tier app that does x" and it presents a project, structured as we would want it, with accompanied DSL languages to help us defined UI flow and Business Layer hooks. Interesting