I just found a really cool blog with posts from the Whitehorse team. There are articles on how to generate the Deployment Report, manage the dozens of constraints and settings in the Application Designer and so on.
I think there is great potential in the Whitehorse toolset. Here are my thoughts/visions on the extensibility. Some of these might be basic (and folk might be doing it already) and some might be impossible, but hey, lets see.
(1) Extend it so that it generates projects using custom enterprise templates.
(2) Add in symbols for Ent Lib so we can add in the required blocks automatically
(3) A 'deployment package' view where you can state which package hold which assembly and where it goes. For instance, in my previous project we had a mix of console apps, DLL's and web apps. When we deployed them we combined some console apps into one project and used command line switches to execute the required pieces. We could potentially do this diagrammatically.
(4)Taking this one step further, you could probably link into App Centre when deploying to farms. I would also like it to trigger the entire build and deploy process. Jeff mentioned (in the above said blog) how some people were just happy with the XML deployment report and wanted to script their own deployments cos they didnt want MS putting stuff on their boxes!! Thats fine for some. I'd be happy to have an automated deployment option.
There's some of my ideas. Does it resound with anyone? think its rubbish?
So we finally got rid of VPC completely because of the problems with Yukon and rebuilt the box with Windows 2003. Now everything connects properly. We've started a couple of sample applications to run through the features.
Since there are two developers on this work we've split it such that I check out Team Architect and my colleague checks out Team Developer. We'll then try out stuff like MSBuild and see how that goes.