After creating my first test guidance package using the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT), I've cobbled together some bullet point steps on how to do it here. This is really rough at the moment, but I'll be adding to it as my knowledge grows. It took a while because there's nothing similar to it,like a walkthrough, in the documentation and I didn't want to use the meta guidance package because I wanted to understand how it all hung together first.

Hi,

Have you looked at the GAT Hands On Lab at http://guidanceautomation.net/cs/library/View.aspx?tab=3&Id=40?

It includes a nice guidance package that you could learna lot from.

thanks,
-Victor.

I hadn't seen that Hands On Lab before. It's quite a nice introduction to using and modifying an existing GAT package. I guess the difference between that and my bullet point list is that I wanted to show how you can build a GAT package from scratch because I couldn't find a single example in any of the documentation. All the examples I'd seen previously were either using the meta-package or modifying an existing package, which is nice, but doesn't really give you a really good grounding in how the core elements of the GAT fit together.

Hi Mike,

Where did you publish your bullet point list? Is it here in a post around the forums?

I'm feeling curious ;-)

thanks,
-Victor.

It's on my blog 'mikehadlow.blogspot.com'. This is the link. I put a link on the original post, but I guess it wasn't very obvious :(

Hi,

I am facing problems while using the HOL Package. I am very new to GAT. So I am not able to figure out the source of the problem.

I am not able to insert recipes in HolPackage.xml or in dataclient.vstemplate using intellisense.... I have run the setuplab batch file again and tried. Did not work!! Please guide me as to how to fix this?

Regards,

Sanjukta, I'm not aware that there's any intellisense implemented for the GAT above what you get from the standard xml namespace functionality. All the GAT development I've done so far has been raw editing of xml files. I guess someday there'll be some tooling for GAT development (maybe using the DSL stuff?) but for the moment you just have to get down and dirty with the code.

Sorry I couldn't help further.

Hi Mike,

That's a nice intro to create a GP from scratch!, it is usually a much better idea to start from zero than to use the GAT-generated solution...

-Victor.

Hi SanjuktaandMike,

The GAX schema is good enough documented to be of help when editing the XML using VS (as the VS XML editor will show tooltips, completion, etc in a nice way). The problem arises when one uses XInclude... right now VS doesn't support this, so using itbasically breaks the intellisense and all nice features you get when you don't use it...

This is a well-known issue (due to the lack of VS support for this) and a -sometimes- big tradeoff you need to consider before deciding to go with using XInclude in your package manfiest...

-Victor.