Those of you interested in software factories should check out the new Blueprints Manger and Sample Blueprint which were released on the Blueprints Codeplex site right after PDC 2008. Jack Greenfield and Michael Lehman hosted the ‘Blueprint booth’ at PDC 2008 where they demoed this latest release. Blueprints represent the next generation Software Factories and solve many of the authoring and deploying issues that we have experienced with GAT/GAX based software factories. In addition, they add some great features (some of them demonstrated in the Sample Blueprint) to the factory space like :

• Multiple interacting Blueprints
• Blueprint Composition
• RSS based updates
• WF-Process structured workflow
• WF-Commands - workflows which can automation developer tasks within Visual Studio
• Custom Menu Filters - allowing menus to appear when the conditions are right
• Code generation using the T4 Template system
• Custom extensions - assemblies which can interact with the user and Visual Studio

Details on Blueprints can be found in the ‘Introduction to Microsoft Blueprints’ paper (link currently broken but will be fixed soon!) that can be downloaded from the Blueprints homepage on MSDN.

More information, samples, screencasts on factory authoring, planning, etc. will be available in the coming period so you better make sure to get back to the Blueprints home on Codeplex reguarly! (expect some info on this blog too ;))