VSX Experience

Recently I installed the Feature Builder Power Tool from here. This VSIX file will install into the Visual Studio Extensions. You should be able to see it appear in your Installed Extensions of the Extension Manager (Tools > Extension Manager).

Important: currently it’s only available for the Visual Studio Ultimate edition to author the feature extension, though it can be deployed and used in the Professional edition.

Prerequisites: Visual Studio SDK

The Feature Builder Power Tool (FBPT) is intended as the successor of Guidance Automation, thus to make it easier to reuse code-based assets and practices by providing a predictable way of packaging and deploying them in Visual Studio. With the introduction of Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling (successor of DSL) and MEF there was a new set of tools within Visual Studio to achieve this goal. Besides the new tools Workflow is added, more later on this topic. As with the DSL tools, the package itself is build with it’s own package.

FBPT is build upon 3 core concepts: Map, Tools and Code.

• Map: guidance for the developer and associated documentation
• Tools: Visual Studio Automation
• Code: artifacts

The package comes with a set of pre-configured project templates, which gives you a quick start. You can find them in the New Project dialog under the Extensibility node as shown in figure.

Let’s look which template contains what and what it is intended for.

1. Info Pack Scenario: Guidance through documentation only; issues only the Map
2. VSX Pack Scenario: Automation only; issues only the Tool
3. Starter Pack Scenario: Documents and Source Code; issues the Map and Tools
4. Starter Pack + Tools Scenario: Automation, Source Code and Documents; issues the Tools, Code and Map
5. Blueprint Scenario: Automation, Source Code and Documents; issues the Tools, Code and an ”enhanced” Map (additional pre- and post-conditions on the guidance)
6. Ultimate Blueprint Scenario: above + additional modeling features
7. Modeling scenario: only the modeling features, issues an ”enhanced” Map

In my opinion, these project templates have no added value when developing a packages. On the other hand, I find them very useful for didactical usage, to explore the possibilities.

Beside the scenario focused project templates there are 2 “naked” project templates: Feature Extension for Premium And Ultimate and Feature Extension for Pro, Premium and Ultimate. Both have a simple one-step workflow and an empty project template. The later can contain tooling that leverages Architect Explorer and UML modeling.

When starting a new project one of the last 2 are recommended.

In future blogs I will first explain the 3 basic concepts and explain the interaction between them to establish a package. Automatically, we’ll hit one of the above project templates.

I should also mention, since the project templates are build with the FBPT itself, when opening a project from the list, it should already give you a good idea of the capabilities of FBPT.