Registering your GAT package in the Experimental hive

During the Web Service Factory Workshop last week we saw a new feature in the GAT / GAX July 2007 release…registering your GAT package in the Experimental hive.

To accomplish this you simply need to add the <RegistrationSettings> element to your guidance configuration file:

<GuidancePackage xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/pag/gax-core”     Name=”ExperimentalPackage”     Caption=”ExperimentalPackage”     Description=”Package to demonstrate the experimental hive installation”     BindingRecipe=”BindingRecipe”     Guid=”88795b6a-6624-448a-8f07-5fea64548753″     SchemaVersion=”1.0″> <HostData>     <RegistrationSettings>/Hive=8.0Exp</RegistrationSettings> </HostData> …

That’s it.  Next time your perform a ‘Register Guidance Package’ action, the package will be registered into the hive.

Notice: 

1. It think this even works with the Clarius SFT, which overrides the ‘Regular’ or ‘Regular & Hive’ options.
2. For those of us debugging the GAT packages using the ‘Debug | Start external program’ feature (as explained by Tom Hollander here), simply add the ‘/rootSuffix Exp’ value in the ‘Start Options | Command line arguments’ box.