- TrIpLeZoNe -

First up, what is EnvDTE? It's actually called Environment Developer Tools Extensibility. It's basically a namespace where you have your DTE which is your Object Model for your Visual Studio .NET Environment. So what has EnvDTE got to do with GAT? A lot.

GAT is the future of Enterprise Templates, but who actually uses Enterprise Templates? Very few. One of the reasons why is that it takes a lot of effort to create one. GAT on the other hand, XML-ize almost everything, and makes it easier to create extensions to your visual studio environment.

So, when writing your actions which manipulates your visual studio environment, you still need to create a DTE, and interface with it. But GAT simplifies the process of creating a wizard for Visual Studio .NET by having a Wizard tag within your recipe. This allows you to create standard look-and-feel wizards and easily create new pages and wizard forms easily. But of course, you'll still need to write some code and use the DTE object for custom wizard controls. It does not hide the difficulty of using DTE, but it still does to a certain extend.

And with that saying, I've been trying out the DTE objects, and trying to extend Visual Studio .NET, and it's really difficult to understand, from a C# point of view, because the DTE in the .NET environment is a COM wrapper, and you guys that dealing with wrappers aren't all that easy. But still, it's pretty extensible.