Microsoft contributes Feature Builder to NuPattern

Today, Microsoft contributed the ‘Feature Extension Runtime’ components (the engine) of the ‘Feature Builder Power Tool’ to the NuPattern project!

This is fantastic news, and the NuPattern community is very grateful to all those at Microsoft who have made this generous contribution.

For those that may not be familiar with the significance of this move, the ‘Feature Extension Runtime’ (FERT) engine is the foundation upon which the NuPattern project was build, a key strategic dependency, and FERT exposes not only the some critical runtime components for NuPattern, but also provides the ability to run contextual and stateful guidance in Visual Studio. The ‘Feature Builder Power Tool’ is no longer supported in Visual Studio 2012, and having this contribution allows NuPattern to move forward to support Visual Studio 2012.

The ‘Feature Builder Power Tool’ was created by the Visual Studio Architecture Team as a first step in the direction of a new generation of contextualized automation tooling, which NuPattern then extended to add an automation platform and model-driven development approach for creating a new wave of domain specific tooling in Visual Studio, now available to everyone.

Now that the FERT components are integrated into the NuPattern project, we shall be able to support and extend this technology moving forward in current and future Visual Studio versions, and provide the ability to all developers to benefit from in-solution contextual guidance.

It marks a great moment in the history of the NuPattern project, and brings to light the work that Microsoft had invested over the last 5 years in a new generation of automation technologies that continue the to deliver on the vision of ‘Software Factories’ and ‘Domain Specific Development’.

More than anything though, this contribution now makes it possible to complete a new version of NuPattern for Visual Studio 2012. Which has been long awaited, and is now imminent.

We would like to recognize the efforts of the following people who have been key in this contribution: Brooke Hamilton, who has done all the hard work in driving and shepherding this contribution from Microsoft to the NuPattern project. This task which has taken months to complete, has been monumental in both effort, patience and tenacity to bring this valuable asset to us. To Gareth Jones from the Visual Studio Ultimate team who has worked closely with the project to make this key contribution. The team that originally created this contribution: David Trowbridge, Jack Greenfield, Michael Lehman, Christof Sprenger, Daniel Cazzulino and Mariano Rodriguez. And finally to the efforts and care of the Microsoft legal team, and the Outercurve Foundation team for getting us to this point.

Roll on the VS2012 version of NuPattern!