HAT Software Factory
The Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) Software Factory is a plug-in module for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The HAT Software Factory is installed by the CCF installer, as a part of the Developer Tools and Samples option that includes all components of the CCF Studio. The HAT Software factory provides guidance to create application hosting projects in CCF.
HAT contains tools that can be used to configure hosted Windows, Web, or Java applications, and make them available to a CCF client. HAT is build to interact with AIF. For more information on AIF, see Application Integration Framework (AIF) Overview.
HAT uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and an extensible UI integration framework to provide application automation for CCF. Workflows created with the HAT are called automations and the extensible application framework components are called data-driven adapters (DDAs). DDAs are assemblies that encapsulate the details of application UI interaction. In CCF 2009, Windows (Win32), Java, and Web applications are handled by the HAT. Automations use DDAs to drive the hosted applications.
The HAT has the following components:
- DDAs
- DDA Bindings are XML information that is passed to the DDA to describe the hosted application.
- Automations are WF workflows that host the business logic of the hosted applications. The HAT SF provides a set of WF activities to manage hosted applications.
The following image illustrates the Hosted Application Toolkit architecture.
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DDA uses Bindings to provide an application’s UI controls to Automations, through the use of easily-identified control names. Automations use these names to manage the UI controls.
Bindings are provided as part of the initialization string procedure during application-startup. AIF extracts these bindings from the initialization string and provide it to the DDA. The following diagram show the typical process during an application-startup:.png "Dd632242.b84d62d0-1a18-4847-9584-bcaa4f503c99(en-us,MSDN.10).png")
Note
In the subsequent sections, we will demonstrate the HAT SF utilities by creating a hosting solution using Windows Notepad for a Windows DDA and Live.com for a Web DDA. In these sections, we will create an automation to search a text in live.com that was previously entered in Notepad.
To be functional, the HAT development environment requires the following:
- A fully functional CCF machine. For more information about setting up and configuring CCF, see the CCF 2009 SP1 Deployment Guide.
- .NET Framework 3.0 or later – available from Microsoft. This includes Windows Workflow Foundation.
- Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) – available from Microsoft.
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 SP1. Optionally, if you are using Visual Studio 2005 you must install the Visual Studio extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 – available from Microsoft.