What is Guidance Automation? Well, if you had asked me a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have known either. But now, I want to know all about it, and I’m sure you do too…
It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with big projects or little ones. Every project needs a structure, a basic architecture and guidelines, that’s what makes it maintainable, easy to understand, and partially successful…
We all know the decisions we have to make at the start of a project, which layers are we going to create, what assemblies will we reference, how will we structure our classes, what namespaces we’ll be using, … In some - if it are not many - cases, we even open some old project and copy some snippets of code that we just use over and over again in each project.
Using Guidance Automation, this whole process becomes easy, clean and very quickly done. As a lead developer, or technical architect, you define how you want to structure your projects. You can create a sort of template, in guidance terms, a package, that will apply some basic concepts in your projects you always want to be present. Let’s say you always create a Domain layer, a Business layer, and a Common layer, or you always start your namespace with the name of the customer the project is destined for. You always gather your Interfaces, your Exceptions and your Entities in separate folders…
With the Guidance Automation Toolkit, you can create a Guidance package that will apply all these concepts for you. The result of it, is a simple setup that users install on their computer, along with the Guidance Automation Extensions which is the run-time on which the packages run. Create a new solution, select your package, and there you go.
You can reference assemblies you re-use in each project and generate classes that are re-invented each time. The sky is the limit… 
Even Microsoft uses GAT/GAX for their own projects (for example the Web Service Software Factory ), that must give you an idea of its strength…
Everybody has advantages on using Guidance packages!
As a lead developer or technical architect, you will save yourself a lot of hours * and frustrations * checking if the project’s setup has been successfully constructed. Using a guidance package, you will have the confidence and security that the basic concepts of your architecture, are applied.
As a developer, you skip the long guidelines documents, the do’s and especially the don’ts about working on a project or generally speaking, on a specific division or company. The package will guide you through creating solutions and projects that respect all guidelines and implement all necessary concepts. If you structure all your projects in the same way, it’s also easy to enter a project at advanced development phase, or even in a testing phase. The structure will be clear and you’ll feel confident in the environment since it’s not new.
Do you want to find out more about Guidance Automation? You can find some interesting links on the links-section, and check out some blogs under the VSX Blogs section. But the most important thing: stay tuned for future posts!!
Laila Bougria
