Sure has been quiet around here. Standard end of the fiscal year craziness. Plus, I had some dogfood issue w/ XP SP2 RC1, Office 2003 SP1 beta and NewsGator. Upgrading to XP SP2 RC2 seems to have solved the problem. Regardless of the cause, I'm way behind reading which in turn leaves me way behind writing.
I've blogged about Software Factories before, but from under the mountain of unread blogs I see Keith blogged about how VSTS will support software factories. He posted an excerpt from an article he's working on.
A software factory is a product line that configures extensible development tools like Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) with packaged content and guidance, carefully designed for building specific kinds of applications. A software factory contains three key ideas: a software factory schema, a software factory template and an extensible development environment.