Don XML is giving tonights talk at
N3UG - Intro to the Guidance Automation Toolkit
"The Guidance Automation Toolkit is an extension to Visual Studio 2005 that allows architects to author rich, integrated user experiences for reusable assets including frameworks, components and patterns. The resulting Guidance Packages are composed of templates, wizards and recipes, which help developers build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture guidance."
If you haven’t heard about the Guidance Automation Toolkit, and you are a senior developer or architect, either hit one of DonXML's talks, or checkout the site dedicated to it. The idea behind GAT (as it is known) is to help organize and deliver technical guidance to your developers. We all have lots of guidance out there in Best Practice Guidelines, Code Snippets, Naming Conventions, etc. but they are not integrated with Visual Studio and, except for using Word, there isn’t much in the way of authoring tools. Visual Studio has something called templates, which is a great starting point for distributing some guidance, but it doesn’t enable things like additional context menus. GAT will let you build on top on templates, and let you create wizards, recipes, and code templates (plus other stuff).
GAT is a free add-on to Visual Studio 2005, and was developed by the Patterns & Practices team in Microsoft.