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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:
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: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=78&siteid=1
Start your engines
PingBack from http://michje.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/new-gaxgat-july-2007-released/
Grigori has just announced the release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation
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
Grigori. Is it possible to install the GAX for both VS2005 and VS2008 at the same time. If so, it can not be done through the UI, so are there any msiexec options to do so from the command line?
Cheers
Steve
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
This new version of GAX is a must if you are thinking to develop Guidance Packages using VS Codename "Orcas"
Grigori,
iif i install acropolis august CTP, MY GAT 1.3 gets screwed up in VS 2008 beta 2....
when i try creating a new GAT project, VS cannot find "Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizard, Version 8.0.0.0....".
I need Acropolis and GAT both running on my machine. Please help me out on this
GAX
GAT and GAX July 2007 CTP
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.
This new version of GAX is a must if you are thinking to develop Guidance Packages using VS Codename