Building a Custom Set of Guidance with Guidance Explorer

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Today I was reminded of the powerful scenario for building a custom set of guidance on the fly using Guidance Explorer.  One of the scenarios for Guidance Explorer that's probably not well known, is the ability to generate MS Word documents.  You can also save to HTML or export to XML.  The idea was that you could build a custom set of guidance by grabbing the guidance modules you wanted. 

In my case, I needed to quickly create two documents -- a set of ASP.NET 2.0 security guidelines and a set of ASP.NET 2.0 security checklist items.  To do this using Guidance Explorer, I took the following steps:

  1. created a new view and named it ASP.NET 2.0 Security Guidelines
  2. filtered the guidelines for ASP.NET 2.0 and Security
  3. dragged the guidelines into my new view
  4. clicked my view and then dragged the Category field over to the far left
  5. sorted the Category field.  This gave me a set of guidelines organized by key areas (authentication, authorization ... etc.)
  6. right-clicked my view, chose Save View As ... and saved the doc to my desktop.

This gave me a single Word document of the ASP.NET 2.0 security guidelines with an index up front and the details in the doc.  I repeated the steps to create a set of ASP.NET 2.0 security checklist items. 

If necessary, I could have tailored the guidance before creating the document.  Another feature that's not well known is that you can use Guidance Explorer as an authoring tool.  You can quickly modify the content of guidance modules and then save to one of your read-write libraries.