Guidance Explorer Revisited - Part 4

In my previous posts on Guidance Explorer Part 1 and Part 2, I discussed about features in GE for guidance Consumption, in Part 3 I discussed about Creation of the guidance. In this post I am going to talk about GE features enabling Distribution of guidance.

The three main categories of guidance distribution are Peers, Teams and Organization.

Peers - Guidance Explorer allows you to share individual guidance items or collections of guidance in a variety of formats

• XML Formats - GE allows you to Export individual or collection of items in XML format, which can be imported by other users in their instance of GE.
  
• HTML Format - GE allows you to Save individual or collection of items in HTML format, which you can share with others not using Guidance Explorer.
• Word Doc - GE allows you to save individual or collection of items in Word doc format which you can share and can be printed and used offline

Teams - Guidance Explorer allows you to share your guidance with other teams in different ways.

• Views - You can export a particular view as a library, which will include all the guidance items referenced by the view.
• Folders - You can export a folder as a library, which will include all the guidance items from the views and folder structure within the folder.
• Library - You can export your team specific library, which will include all the guidance items within the library.

Other teams can import the exported library in their instance of GE.

Organization - Organizations can share libraries by publishing them to a UNC or HTTP location so that team members can subscribe to them. Once subscribed the Guidance Explorer user, if connected to the network, will always see up to date content for that library. When offline, the user can view the version of the library cached on the local file system.

With this post, I have covered all the major areas of GE. Hope this has been helpful and inspires you to start using GE and leverage all its cool features!!

~Later

Guidance Explorer Revisited - Part 3

In my previous posts on Guidance Explorer Part 1 and Part 2, I discussed about features in GE for guidance Consumption. In this post I am going to talk about GE features enabling Creation of consistent high quality guidance. GE allows users to author new guidance items or modify existing items.

Following features in GE enables the Creation of guidance.

Built in Guidance Types - GE by default provides number of built in guidance types like Checklists Items, Code Examples, Explained, FAQ, Guidelines, How Tos, Patterns etc. They allow you to pick guidance type most suitable for your needs. Guidance Types encourage authors to write fine grained guidance items. For example one Guideline at a time vs. creating a monolithic document that covers all Guidelines for an area of concern.

Templates - GE by default provides Templates for all the default built in guidance types. The templates allows you to write consistent guidance.

Test Cases - With each Template GE provides set of test cases targeted to various sections of the template. The test cases ensures that guidance modules you create meet optimum quality.

Custom Guidance Types - GE also allows you to create new guidance types. To create a new guidance type the you have to provide an icon that will represent the guidance type in the tree, a template that authors can use to create the guidance type and an example that authors can use to see the guidance type in action.

My Library - Its a node in the GE, which is your workspace to create guidance, you can add any number of libraries you want and create guidance items in the specific library. You can modify items from a read only library like patterns & practices Library and save them to you library.

Hope this inspires you to create the guidance which you have been procrastinating forever. Happy authoring!!

~Later

Guidance Explorer Revisited - Part 2

There are two aspects to guidance Consumptions, Discovery and Composition. I have talked about GE features supporting guidance discovery in my previous post. In this post I am going to talk about GE features enabling Composition i.e. organization of the guidance.

Following features in GE enables the composition of guidance.

Views - Views are a by-reference view of guidance items within a single library or across multiple libraries. My Views node in the GE is your workspace to organize guidance. You can create views and drag and drop relevant guidance from guidance list across libraries.

Search Views - A search view is an extension of normal views. While still a by-reference collection of guidance items, the items are selected by a query rather than by manual selection. For instance a search view could be created to select Checklist Items for a performance code review on a .NET 2.0 application.The benefit of a search view is that it will update with new items that match the query once they become available.

You can create complex tree structure of views, search views and folders to organize the guidance in a way that makes sense from your project perspective. For example you can compose and use a discrete set of guidelines and checklists that match to the tasks you are performing on a daily basis

~Later

Guidance Explorer Revisited - Part 1

One of the exciting projects on which I have worked in recent times is Guidance Explorer. It is a great tool that enables Consumption, Creation, and Distribution of development guidance. I believe its a very useful but underrated tool, hence thought it might be a good idea to run a few posts in an attempt to bring forth the real power of the tool.

In this post I am going to talk about GE features enabling consumption of guidance. There are two aspects to guidance consumption, Discovery and Composition. First you need to discover the relevant guidance and then organize the guidance in a way that makes sense from your project perspective. GE helps you with both these activities.

Following features in GE improves the discovery of guidance.

patterns & practices Library - GE by default comes with a subscription to a online patterns & practices library, which is a central store of modular, trustworthy, quality, comprehensive development guidance. This library is updated by p&p folks on regular basis. So you have a single place to look for required guidance rather than hunting all over the Internet.

Metadata attributes - Each guidance module in the Guidance Library has following set of metadata attributes with it

• Rule Type – Describes the impact of this item (e.g. Design, Implementation, Deployment)
• Technology – Describes a specific technology and version this item applies to (e.g. ASP.NET 2.0)
• Topic – Describes the major area of concern this item addresses (e.g. Security, Performance, Reliability)
• Category – Describe a secondary categorization that can be used to organize the item beyond topic (e.g. Caching, Input/Data Validation)
• Authors - List all the major contributors to the item
• Status – Describes stage of completion (e.g. Beta, Release)
• Priority – Describes relative importance of this item (e.g. 1, 2, 3)
  

These attributes are displayed in the guidance list view along with the title of each guidance module and can be used for sorting, filtering or searching the guidance list. Having a rich set of metadata further enhances the discoverability of required and relevant guidance.

Default Views - patterns & practices provides default type views of the guidance available for example Guidelines, Mini How Tos, Checklist items etc. They help in narrowing down the search by specific types.

You can download the Guidance Explorer at the following location http://www.codeplex.com/guidanceExplorer/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=650

You can download latest source code for Guidance Explorer, it consists of source code for Guidance Explorer client and online store, on which patterns and practices library runs.

~Later