Steps to Learn ATF

Table of Contents Join the ATF Community Programming Guidelines Tutorials Samples ATF Programmer's Guide DOM Reference Learn about framework development

Follow these steps to learn about ATF.

Join the ATF Community

Ask questions, request features, and report problems on our GitHub issue tracker. Sony employees who are members of SCE with SHIP accounts can also use this private forum.

Programming Guidelines

If you are a Sony employee who is a member of SCE with a SHIP account, read the ATF Programming Guidelines to learn the programming and code style guidelines followed by the Authoring Tools Framework team. Even though you are not developing ATF itself, these are useful development guidelines.

Tutorials

Do the ATF Tutorials. These show how you can convert an existing ATF sample to the application you want to create with ATF.

Samples

Build samples that interest you and run them, as described in Installing and Building ATF. Read about the samples programming in ATF Code Samples Discussions. Examine the sample's source, starting with the Program.cs file. In the Main() function, note how components are added to the MEF TypeCatalog. Take a look at some of the components’ code. Read other code in the samples.

ATF Programmer's Guide

Study the topics in the ATF Programmer's Guide to learn the basics of programming with ATF.

DOM

If you are going to use a DOM, study the ATF Programmer’s Guide: Document Object Model (DOM) to learn how to use ATF’s DOM.

Reference

If there are ATF terms unfamiliar to you, look them up in the ATF Glossary. See the ATF Reference for other reference material, such as the API Reference.

Learn about framework development

The following books contain lots of useful information about developing frameworks, and ATF development follows the guidelines they suggest. It is especially useful to follow these guidelines in components you write, because these are essentially extending ATF and .NET.

• Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition) by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. This is an excellent book whose guidelines ATF follows in developing a reusable extensible framework. MSDN has much of the book’s content as well as the naming guidelines.
• Programming C# 5.0, Building Windows 8, Web, and Desktop Applications for the .NET 4.5 Framework by Ian Griffiths, O’Reilly Media.