As part of their job, software architects often try to establish best practices for developers working on a project within an organization. Recently released Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) for Visual Studio help architects and teams achieve this goal. The extensions can be downloaded from MSDN.

Atop GAX runs the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT),l also downloadable. This is described as a package that enables architects to create reusable assets including Software Factories, frameworks, and patterns. The resulting templates and wizards help developers “build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture guidance,” according to posted material on the MSDN site.

Key parts of the toolkit include:

Recipes. These automate activities usually performed manually;

Actions. These are atomic units of work called in a defined sequence by recipes;

Text Template Transformation Templates. Such templates combine text and scriptlets that, when run, return a string that is directly inserted into the output stream of the template;

Type Converters that validate the value of a field and convert this from its user interface representation to a type representation; and

Visual Studio Templates.  These can be associated with recipes, are written in XML, and can be expanded by the Visual Studio template engine.

GAX and GAT must be downloaded and installed separately, notes Microsoft blogger Grigori Melnik. GAT requires that GAX is installed first.

Remember GotDotNet? Miss it?

Well, Microsoft has rolled out yet another place for programmers to post stuff. It’s called MSDN Code Gallery, and it was formally unveiled a couple weeks ago.

In a blog announcement, Soma Somasegar described it as “a portal for snippets, samples and other resources.” From the home page, programmers can browse the existing library or upload their own resources and, thus, add to the library. New releases and most popular releases are aggregated under separate headings on the bottom of the page.

We half-sarcastically call this “yet another place to find stuff” because it is not the first code and resource repository Microsoft has rolled out since it phased out GotDotNet. As Somasegar pointed out, there’s CodePlex, which is meant for live code projects, and there’s the Microsoft Download Center, which is for formal releases like SDKs and Service Packs.

In contrast, he said, “Code Gallery is a pure storage site with no project management capabilities.” Basically, it’s a place to share code you’ve written, with the hope that others in the community will benefit from it. We think folks will appreciate the egalitarianism — and, as the Shameless Plug Dept. tells us, the popularity of our own VBCode.com site suggests the same. In contrast, he said, “Code Gallery is a pure storage site with no project management capabilities.”

Basically, it’s a place to share code you’ve written, with the hope that others in the community will benefit from it. We think folks will appreciate the egalitarianism — and, as the Shameless Plug Dept. tells us, the popularity of our own VBCode.com site suggests the same.

 ”.NET developers cannot live on Visual Studio alone.” Thus we introduced our All-in-One Buying Guide: Tools for the .NET Developer to the world last summer.

We bring it up again for a couple reasons. First, we’re pretty darn proud of that line and embrace any excuse to recycle it. Second, and more important, we’ve been updating it regularly (every month, in fact), and it now offers information on more than 200 products.

Those monthly updates go by the equally clever title of Windows Developments. (When you’re hot, you’re hot.) The most recent version is here, and it includes products and plug-ins like Rhino Mocks, Oracle Data Access Components and OnTime 2008.

However, we are more proud of the All-in-One Buying Guide. For starters, as we said, it’s a big honkin’ list. In addition, it is divided into eight topics — or genres, for the literati in the crowd — so you can peruse product listings that are specifically tailored to your needs. Finally, with the official Visual Studio 2008 marketing launch coming up, we expect that Tools for the .NET Developer will start to fill with plenty of new components, debuggers and general tools that are compatible with VS 2008.

So go check out the All-in-One Buying Guide: Tools for the .NET Developer and let us know what you think. Are there any categories missing? Are some of the existing categories too vague? Heck, are there any products missing? (We should point out that we’ve only recently shed the “products” label and are now including some key open-source tools, so that explains some omissions — but by all means point those out to us.)

Thanks, as always, for the input.

James Newkirk - an original NUnit developer - and Brad Wilson recently shared some more of their work on the XUnit test framework. The download is available on the CodePlex site.

According to Ben Hall, blogger and Red Gate Software test engineer, the framework itself

is…built using .NET Framework 2.0, doesn’t require any installation (XCopy) which makes it great for storing in source control and includes a TestDriven.NET runner, ReSharper runner and a console runner for executing the tests.

Hall digs into the XUnit innards and says it has some really interesting concepts. He looks forward to V.1 and thereafter. One wonders, can XUnit ever win a place in developers’ hearts akin to NUnit?

Forgive our gratuitous use of .NET in the headline there, but Microsoft has re-released its download of.NET 3.5 so that it now includes the Service Pack releases of .NET 2.0 and 3.0.

Here’s the latest .NET Framework 3.5 download, date-stamped yesterday,  and here’s the readme document for .NET 3.5.

These next two Knowledge Base documents outline what is in the older .NET Service Pack releases that have been bundled into the new .NET 3.5 release.

• Problems that are fixed in the .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1
• Problems that are fixed in the .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1

Finally, if you have separate implementations of .NET 2.0 or 3.0 running somewhere out there, the links to those Service Pack releases are below. All contain “prerequisite feature support” for .NET 3.5; in the case of the .NET 2.0 SP1, said support also covers .NET 3.0.

• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x64)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x86)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1

Happy downloading.