Open GAX/GAT

When I heard that the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group was going to stop working on the Guidance Automation Extension (GAX) and Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT), my heart nearly stopped. After all, I had invested quite a lot of effort and time into developing my Layered Architecture Solution Guidance extension on it.

I couldn't believe it since the P&P group themselves had invested so much on GAX/GAT and had built so many software factories on it. Turns out that those software factories were also on the path of being discontinued. :(

As the release of Visual Studio 2012 nears, I was getting more worried that my tool will eventually die. I needed to find ways to migrate my tool but I had limited time and skills. One option was to use Feature Builder. It was a nice alternative with some assisted UI but it was very confusing for me; not to mention that I find it very clunky and it slows down my Visual Studio tremendously. I really thought I had no choice but to dive into the Visual Studio SDK and do all the heavy lifting myself.

Luckily enough, early this year, the P&P group was persuaded to opensource the GAX/GAT code. Hence, the Open GAX/GAT project was born. But it was left in a dormant state for many months until recently, a good individual from Microsoft had actually took the effort to migrate the code to Visual Studio 2012. (You are a savior dude! Because of you my tool can survive another version of Visual Studio. *Hugs*)

I know some people told me that GAX/GAT was like a 'band-aid' (or handiplast for my localized version), but hey, it is an easy to learn and fast framework to build Visual Studio automation. After all, small cuts don't need big bandages right :p

Now if you are a small time automation developer like me who felt stranded because of the discontinuance of GAX/GAT, worry no more, Open GAX/GAT will allow us to port our code to VS 2012. In fact, I had already ported LASG to Open GAX/GAT and now preparing the VS 2012 version for release :)

Note: If you noticed from the discussion forum, they are actually looking for active contributors who can really enhance the code. Unfortunately, my VS programming skills are really half-a-bucket-of-water. If you are well-verse in the VS SDK or the EnvDTE APIs and have some free time to kill, do consider helping out in the project. You could be helping out lotsa people. ;)