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Software Factories: 100,000 served!

  • Article

When a car company needs to create a new car, they don’t go down to the local hardware store to buy generic parts and tools, and start putting them all together. Instead they have highly specialized factories, using customized processes and tools, designed to build a specific make and model of car.

When a team starts building a piece of software, the experience today is generally much more like a trip to the hardware store. Over the last year Microsoft has been investing in Software Factories, which aim to bring the benefits of automation found in other industries to software development, resulting in improved quality, consistency and time-to-market. A software factory is an installable package of tools, processes and guidance that extends Visual Studio and optimizes it for developing a specific type of application, like an occasionally connected client or a WCF-based service. In practical terms, a factory provides capabilities such as wizards, templates, designers, code generation and documentation, and guides a team through the development process by surfacing tools and content appropriate to the task at hand.

There are two key elements to our software factory strategy. First, we’re providing a platform that allows users to execute, customize and build software factories within Visual Studio. Today, our software factory platform consists of the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX), Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) and Domain Specific Language Tools. Second, we are building a number of software factories that target some of the most common enterprise application types.

In the 6 months since the release of our first software factory there have been over 100,000 downloads of four different software factories. In addition to us delivering this, many of our partners including Infosys, EDS and Avanade are starting to build factories and include them in their technical strategies. In addition, tools such as GAT and DSL Tools enable anyone to build their own factories, either using existing factories as a starting point, or starting from scratch.

While it will take us a number of years to completely realize the software factory vision, we hope our current generation of factories provide some great first steps towards more streamlined software development projects – and that our roadmap with Visual Studio Team System will continue this journey.

Namaste!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2007
    Over 100,000 to be precise. Take a look at Soma's recent announcement of this important milestone for

  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2007
    Soma , our division's VP, has just announced on his blog that the first four patterns & practices

  • Anonymous
    January 29, 2007
    There's a nice plug for our work on Soma's blog - Somasegar is the corporate vice president of Developer

  • Anonymous
    January 30, 2007
    I have already said my piece on the Vista launch but also Office 2007 launches today which really rocks.

  • Anonymous
    January 30, 2007
    But as i remember SF are integrated in any other IDE, not only in VSTS?

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2007
    La rica capacidad de visualización apenas empieza , vea este video y asegurese de probar este visor 3d

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2007
    There was some "negative" comments on your post in InfoWorld (http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/HNfactories_1.html). I have made some comments on this article and the Software Factory and Software Product Lines approaches in the following post http://blog.martinig.ch/?p=14

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2007
    Hi Franco, Your blog is a great articulation of the situation.  We do know that we can and need to do a better job of talking about software factories. You can see an ok description here, but we know we have more work to do. http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/topics/SoftwareFactories/default.aspx

  • Anonymous
    December 25, 2007
    I am wondering if you can share the feedback of the Software Factories as it can be used to do research on software factories Thank You, Sridhar Ch (working on software factories research)

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2008
    About a year ago I blogged about Software Factories and the great response from people who were using

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2008
    I have already said my piece on the Vista launch but also Office 2007 launches today which really rocks. The much better Outlook 2007 is worth the price of admission alone IMHO. Vista and Office Launches Vista Launch Page Bill Gates Keynote European Launch

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2009
    <a href="http://www.ebstime.com/">Time attendance management</a> Getting help managing your employee schedule and their time is never a bad thing to do. Ebstime.com can get you neat and tidy so that you can measure and coordinate your funds correctly and efficiently.

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2009
    Information on software industry is something which is very much demanding for younger and this is always appreciated without any discrimination. But about the drawing or bonuses one has to careful for online transaction because like online lottery scams there is lot of rip-off. So be careful!