Guidance Package Management UI

The Guidance Package Management user interface (UI), highlighted in Figure 1, is integrated with the Visual Studio user interface. It provides developers with tools for interacting with the Guidance Packages and the Guidance Automation Extensions.

Figure 1: Guidance Package Management UI

The Guidance Package Management UI consists of two main features: the Guidance Package Manager and the Guidance Navigator.

The Guidance Package Manager lets developers perform a variety of operations on guidance packages, recipes, and Visual Studio templates. It can be accessed by clicking Guidance Package Manager on the Visual Studio Tools menu. The following user operations are supported from the Guidance Package Manger:

• Viewing installed Guidance Packages. Information about installed Guidance Packages is stored in the framework manifest file. The Guidance Package Manager inspects the file and shows available Guidance Packages to the user.
• Inspecting content of a Guidance Package. When asked to inspect a Guidance Package, Guidance Package Manager reads the configuration file of the Guidance Package and inspects the Guidance Package directory. Based on this information. the Guidance Package Manager shows the user a list of Guidance Package recipes and templates. The user can inspect both enabled and disabled Guidance Packages.
• Enabling a Guidance Package. After a Guidance Package is installed, it must be enabled before its recipes and templates can be used inside a Visual Studio solution. The developer can enable a package from the Guidance Package Manager.
• Disabling a Guidance Package. This is the opposite of enabling a Guidance Package. Disabling a Guidance Package does not uninstall it.
• Viewing solution recipes and templates. The Guidance Package Manager communicates with the Recipe Framework foundation and shows all recipe and template references currently associated with the solution.
• Executing a recipe. The developer can select a recipe reference and execute its recipe directly from the Guidance Package Manager. Templates cannot be executed from the Guidance Package Manager; they have to be executed from the Add New Project or Add New Item dialog boxes.
• Deleting a recipe reference. The developer can delete a recipe reference by selecting it and clicking delete.

The Guidance Navigator is a dockable tool window that helps users discover, learn about, and use guidance in a Guidance Package as they work on a Visual Studio solution. To view the Guidance Navigator in Visual Studio, point to Other Windows on the View menu, and then click Guidance Navigator Window. The following user operations are supported from the Guidance Navigator:

• Selecting a Guidance Package. The Guidance Navigator can display guidance from only one Guidance Package at a time. Users can select the current Guidance Package from all of those that are active in the current solution. The Guidance Navigator also provides an option to open the Guidance Package Manager to enable or disable Guidance Packages.
• Viewing Guidance Package overview information. The Overview tab in the Guidance Navigator can display overview information about the selected Guidance Package. It may also include links to more detailed information in the documentation or on the Web.
• Viewing active recipes and templates. The Available Guidance tab in the Guidance Navigator shows all template references, bound recipes, and active unbound recipes currently associated with the solution.
• Viewing a history of recipes and templates that have been run. The History tab in the Guidance Navigator shows a list of recipes and templates that have previously been run against the current solution.
• Learning more about a recipe or template. The Available Guidance and History tabs list links to related resources for each recipe or template, such as patterns or other documentation pages. Recipes listed on the History tab may also provide links to suggested next steps.
• Executing a Recipe or Template. The developer can execute a recipe or unfold a template directly from the Available Guidance tab of the Guidance Navigator. The developer can also rerun recurrent recipe using the link “Run this recipe again” from the History Tab.

See also

Components of the Guidance Automation Toolkit | The Recipe Framework Foundation | The Wizard Framework Extension | The T4 Templating Engine