Signs on the Sand

By the way, this is sort of a milestone for the Mvp.Xml project - Microsoft has released Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) and Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) for Visual Studio 2005 which uses and includes recently released Mvp.Xml library v2.0, particularly our XInclude implementation.

This is the first Microsoft product using XInclude via Mvp.Xml library. Hope not the last one, way to go guys. I truly hope to see one day Microsoft Biztalk release including our EXSLT implementation.

As a matter of interest - Mvp.Xml project is an open-source project hosted at SourceForge, led by Microsoft MVPs and supplementing XML processing functionality in .NET. We currently provide .NET implementations of EXSLT, XML Base, XInclude, XPointer as well as a unique set of utility classes and tools making XML programming in .NET platform easier, more productive and effective. Microsoft has licensed the Mvp.Xml project and has rights to use and distribute our code base.

A short summary on what this stuff is:

The Guidance Automation Toolkit is an extension to Visual Studio 2005 which allows architects to author rich, integrated user experiences for reusable assets including frameworks, components and patterns. The resulting Guidance Packages composed of templates, wizards and recipes help developers build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture guidance. The Guidance Automation Extensions for Visual Studio 2005 is a runtime component that must be installed to use the Guidance Automation Toolkit itself, as well as to use any guidance packages built using the Guidance Automation Toolkit. For more information, see Introduction to the Guidance Automation Toolkit.

And note XInclude amongst new features:

New in this release

The December 2005 CTP of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions is a minor update to the previous May 2005 CTP. In addition to being updated to work on the final release of Visual Studio 2005, a number of new features have been added. These include:

o Integration with the T4 Text Templating Engine (which is also used by the DSL Toolkit)
o T4 Templates can now be associated with Item Templates
o Recipe references can now be placed on cascading menus
o Two new extensibility points have been added: the Action Execution Service and the Action Coordination Service
o XInclude can be used in recipe definition files to reference XML fragments stored in external files