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New GAX/GAT July 2007 Released

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I am pleased to announce the release of the July 2007 CTP of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions.
(Note, the updated MSIs are published and available for download; while the MSDN page may still be saying February 2007 - that will be fixed as soon as MSDN changes propagate)  

New in this release

It is a minor update to the previous February 2007 CTP, and includes the following fixes and improvements:

  • Support for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 Betas 1 and 2 (Orcas)
  •  Improved installer (using The Windows Installer XML (WiX))
  • Support for Registration as Normal User (RANU) and experimental hive
  • Enhanced support for installing Visual Basic templates

Do I need to upgrade?

Upgrade is recommended but not required as there are no critical fixes. If you wish to design and run guidance packages on VS2008, this version of GAX/GAT must be installed.

How do I upgrade?

If you are running previous releases of GAX, you must

1) unregister all existing guidance packages (including GAT),

2) uninstall previous version of GAX

3) install the new version of GAX

4) reinstall the guidance packages.

This is far from ideal installation experience, but improving it is not trivial and was beyond the scope of this release.

Will existing guidance packages and software factories still work with this release?

Yes, if you run them on Visual Studio 2005.

However, any current guidance packages built against February 2007 CTP under Visual Studio 2005 (including all software factories provided by Microsoft patterns & practices on the date of this release - Web Client Software Factory, Smart Client Software Factory, Mobile Client Software Factory, and Web Service Software Factory) will NOT work on Orcas. Should you plan to design and run your own factories/guidance packages on Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, those will need to be specifically designed as such.

What kind of enhanced support is there for installing Visual Basic templates?

We have modified the GAX installation classes so they will not try registering VB templates at installation time if VB is not installed on the box. Previous versions of GAX did try this, and if no VB was in the box the entire installation failed. Now the installation will not fail and VB templates will simply not be shown.

Why is this still branded a CTP?

Like the previous releases, this new release is still labeled a Community Technology Preview. This is because the deliverables are still unsupported. Keep in mind that both GAX and GAT are only designed to run on development machines, not production servers. That said, we've gone through the same quality gates with GAT and GAX as we do with any other p&p release, and we are confident we have a high quality release.

Where do I get more information or post questions?

On the community forum: https://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=78&siteid=1

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2007
    Start your engines

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2007
    PingBack from http://michje.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/new-gaxgat-july-2007-released/

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2007
    Grigori has just announced the release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2007
    Grigori has just announced the release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2007
    Grigori has just announced the release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2007
    One of the difficulties we faced while removing the old GAX was leftover guidance packages developed using it. During initial experimentation, we created a lot of Guidance projects and registered them locally. We no longer had code for them and were in a fix as without code, you cannot unregister the guidance package and without unregistering you cannot uninstall GAX. Pablo’s blog at the following location helped us fix this issue. He explains how to manually unregister the a guidance package http://www.clariusconsulting.net/blogs/pga/archive/2006/10/13/4522.aspx

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    It is a minor update to the previous February 2007 CTP, and includes the following fixes and improvements:

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    Steve, no, side-by-side installation is not supported. May I ask why you need it? If it's for experimentation, have you considered running VS2005 and VS2008 in separate virtual machines? Grigori

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    This new version of GAX is a must if you are thinking to develop Guidance Packages using VS Codename "Orcas"

  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 21, 2007
    GAX

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2007
    dhawalk, Orcas beta 2 has incremented the version number of that DLL to 9.0, so what we did in GAX was to redirect request for this DLL v8 to v9. It appears that the Acropolis installation may have overwritten this redirect. We are looking at possible solutions. Grigori

  • Anonymous
    September 07, 2007
    This new version of GAX is a must if you are thinking to develop Guidance Packages using VS Codename

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2007
    Hi Grigori, I was playing around with actions and i came across Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Library.Solution.Actions.MoveProjectItemAction I was assuming that MoveProjectItemAction will be usefull for moving around Project items. But when  I tried doing so, it didnt work. I have posted this question is MSDN forums, but have not got any response yet.Can You please lead me to a person, who may be able to tell me, how do I move around project items