Recently a good friend and former co-worker of mine, Michael Lehman released the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 Preview for RC on the Visual Studio Gallery. This is a power tool that is intended to help Technical Leads or Solution Architects (.Net focused) to extensions, code snippets, guidance maps of tasks or steps, models which can be shared within Visual Studio or with others in the Visual Studio Gallery.
The tool can create two different kinds of extensions using Feature Builder.
- Standard Feature Extension - can contain tools, code, and a simple map - it will run on the Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Professional editions (in the final version of this tool).
- Ultimate Feature Extension - can contain everything a standard Feature Extension can contain, as well as rich modeling and visualization tools that can take advantage of the modeling platform inside the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition (required). These tools can be used to provide a logical view of your target solution, and to visualize your existing code. This is the preferred type of extension to use if you intend to provide architectural guidance or share specific refactoring or pattern knowledge.
An introductory video (which includes a "hello world" example) is available on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/
Additional information and support will be available via the Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Discovery & Modeling Tools Forum
