Features

The Macaw Solutions Factory offers a wealth of features that reduce costs and improve productivity and quality of application lifecycle management for IT solutions built on Microsoft server products.

Supported products

The Factory supports solutions built on top of any combination of these Microsoft products:

  • Microsoft Silverlight 3
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008
  • Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, 2006 R2 and 2009
  • Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Supported ALM products

The Factory supports the following application lifecycle management products:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, Professional edition or Team System editions
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2005 or 2008
  • Subversion

Application lifecycle management features

Key ALM features that the Factory adds to the supported ALM products are:

  • Standardized structure for implementation and logical design, based on Microsoft Patterns & Practices guidance
  • Continuous Database Integration
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Fully automated deployment across machines and DTAP environments
  • Automatic validation of implementation against standards
  • Automation of common development tasks within Visual Studio
  • Context-sensitive guidance integrated into Visual Studo, with centralized community driven content in a Factory Wiki
  • Scalable from small projects to large development programs
  • Factory versioning per solution - each solution can have it's own factory version, even when using shared DTAP environments
  • Open implementation in Windows PowerShell provides easy customization and extension

In the blog posts below you can learn all the details on some of the most compelling features that the Factory has to offer.