I just finished my first experiments with Microsofts Guidance Automation Toolkit a.k.a. GAT. This toolkit is an interesting possibility for architects or chief programmers to offer guidance and best practices to their team - not just as written documentation as it can be found on Microsofts patterns and practices site. Using GAT you can create your own guidance packages containing a set of executable recipes for repetitive design and programming tasks in Visual Studio 2005.
GAT recipes are built to appear in a strictly context sensitive fashion. They offer their functionality just in those situations when they should be used - that's the main idea behind the concept. Recipes can be invoked via context menus or from the task pane and work in several steps. First they collect input data needed for their task. This might happen either through the help of extensible wizard dialogs or without user interaction at all (and rather through your code). Having the required input arguments one or more actions are invoked. These actions might manipulate your current project settings or - more typical - add some pieces of code to your project. Code injection is done through the use of a source file template mechanism. Recipes are defined declaratively as XML templates.
GAT builds on GAX (Guidance Automation eXtensions), which extends the possibilities of the Visual Studio API. I tried the latest Technology Preview from May 2005, which works with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and can be downloaded here. It all works quite nice. My only major problem was editing the code templates. The VS editor isn't yet familiar with the template markup and tries to reformat your code in situations when you don't appriciate it...
Check out the community site and its Hands On Lab from Teched 2005, which uses GAT to automate certain data access tasks and explains the main concepts.
In my opinion this is another step into the right direction - building the foundations for Software Factories.
