Recipe Designer and SFT June CTP

Today we shipped the June CTP of the Clarius Software Factories Toolkit, which includes a new version of the Recipe Designer. The main change what I've been working on, is the serialization behavior in order to support round tripping, beside that was an interesting opportunity to work implementing a custom serialization in a Dsl.

So now if you change the .xml extension of the recipe definition file with .recipe extension, you'll get a graphical representation of your recipe, the only constraint that it has is that it is not supporting XInclude.

Key features

Round tripping: Now you can edit your recipe using the default xml editor as usual maintaining the synchronization with the designer with no extra work.

Improved User Experience: Simplest new ToolBox. Now you basically have two connectors, one to connect arguments with wizard fields or action properties and another to define the flow between actions and between pages. Also the shapes includes useful information like the friendly type name and in the case of arguments if it's required or not

Main manifest syncronization: if the recipe definition is well formed, you'll get an xinclude of your recipe in the main manifest file. Also if the recipe already has a unbounded reference, it will be added in the BindingRecipe recipe.

Configurable Attributes Support: You can define in the designer view all your configurable attributes in any element that support it, like actions, valueproviders, etc.

We're working on the next release of Software Factories Toolkit, your comments, suggestions and bug reports are welcome. You can give your feedback through SFT Forums.
http://softwarefactoriestoolkit.net/forums.aspx

Download Software Factories Toolkit Here.