Republished with Permission - Original Article

JD Meier from the Prescriptive Architecture Guidance Group (aka PAG) at Microsoft stopped by my office this morning to show me the new Guidance Explorer tool he has been working on.  This is a cool WinForms client application that aggregates PAG guidance and suggestions, and allows you to search and sort across it.  This makes it ideal for quickly reviewing checklists of suggestions for ASP.NET projects.  Each guidance rule covers why it should be followed, and includes instructions on how to implement it.

(Note: Click the screen-shots to enlage them)

Figure 1

A nice feature the tool provides is the ability to create and save "custom views" of just the guidance you care about.  For example, in the screen-shot below I created a new custom view called "Scott Team" and then dragged/dropped a subset of the guidelines/suggestions I cared about into it:

Figure 2

Even better, you can optionally right-click on either a guideline or a view made up of guidelines and export them to either a word document or html file:

Figure 3

You can learn more about the tool and download it for free here (the download location is in the bottom right of the page).  There is also a Wiki on Channel9 with more information here, and JD has a great blog to subscribe to here. The plan is to continually update the tool with additional guidance rules and checklists over the next few months (they've been doing 3-4 updates a month lately).  I definitely recommend checking it out.

Hope this helps,

Scott