GCF introduced a tool called CreateAppTemplate in version 1.6.3 (released in March of 2008). The tool basically helped in quickly creating new GCF based applications. By providing the tool with some basic information, developers could expect a fully compilable application to be generated. Once the template was generated, developers only had to fill in the details to get their ‘functional application’ up and running.

With time, CreateAppTemplate became a maintenance nightmare. Whenever new components got added, it became difficult to add support for them. More over CreateAppTemplate was not handling dependencies between components. Hence we thought that it was time to let go of CreateAppTemplate.

Enter CreateAppTemplateWizard.

CreateAppTemplateWizard is a new tool that developers can now use to generate code for GCF applications.

The tool, as the name suggests, is a wizard that asks a series of simple questions and generates a customized GCF application for you.

The wizard also knows how to configure your applications for using the “automatic updates” feature in the next version of GCF.

Later this year, we have plans to support GCF applications in Qt Creator. This wizard will, I am sure, prove to be very useful there.