The ‘Feature Builder Power Tool’ was originally built by the Visual Studio Architecture team as a component of an overall vision to deliver software factory tooling to enterprise customers. The work started in earnest in 2008, and the FBPT project concluded within about 6-8 months. The project had a...

I am a bit tardy on the blogs about this, but if you haven't heard yet - we recently opened a new site dedicated to building and sharing a community of knowledge around Software Factories. http://sf.devrevolution.com/ Huge thanks to Martin Danner who has hosted the site for us, and Edward Bakker who...

If you are building DSL's and you haven't heard yet, we released the Editor PowerToy last month. The current release is only a small step towards the vision we have for the PowerToy that will deliver a very powerful capability to provide additional customized views in a tool-window (for your DSL diagram...

You might be happy to know we have just released the first version of the ‘ DSL Editor PowerToy’ on our codeplex project! This initial release is slated as: “A means to add a DSL specific tool-window, containing a simple editor, to an existing DSL” You can download this release from the site...

If you are building DSL languages today, you may have experienced at least one of the following issues when figuring out how to represent your languages' domain model on a diagram surface: Representing most of the domain classes as shapes makes the diagram really complex and cluttered, and therefore...

This was to be a FAQ, but due to the fact that the practices around this are unproven yet, there is no definitive answer to this question, rather a discussion of approaches, issues, guidelines and raising general awareness. At the moment, there is quite a buzz about the correct usage of DSL's and...

I recently decided to do a series of articles on factory schemas. It has become obvious over the last while that the factory schema has enormous power both as a means to describe a factory and its content, a means to describe the factory itself and a means to offer huge benefits to the factory user...

So, we have now had a pretty thorough look at what a factory schema is in a number of previous articles , and now how it can be used from both the factory builder’s perspective and also the factory user’s perspective. In this article, I wanted to dig a little deeper in usage of the schema and demonstrate...

If you were following the previous post on File | New | 'Blank Problem' you will see we are a fair way from a development environment that provides us a starting point for defining the requirements for a solution, let alone a single environment for defining the problem. Until the day we can open Visual...