Following close on the heels of VS2010 Beta1, we've announced the corresponding DSL SDK (oh those acronyms) - see Jean-Marc's blog .

Cameron has been blogging about new features in our product.. In a recent post he used the term Explicit Design. I've been reflecting on this, and I like it. In software development we really do need to capture design data that is not just the code, but...

Keith Short has been blogging about Oslo and the DSL Toolkit and Oslo's use of model-driven terminology. There's been a fair amount of speculation about how all these things fit together, so it is good now PDC is over to be able to clarify the relationships...

Stuart has blogged about the new features expected in DSL Tools in VS 2010. There's plenty new there: DSL libraries, DSL extensibility, read-only models, forms-based UI, ModelBus, precompiled templates, movable labels, sticky tools, copy/paste and more...

So is UML really contradictory to DSLs? Do they really represent different philosophies? I don’t think so. After all, UML is just a set of domain specific languages. If you want to model use cases, or state transition diagrams, what other DSLs would you...

A slightly belated hello to Eyal who has joined the DSL Tools team in Cambridge. Welcome Eyal!

See the VSX team blog .

The website for our DSL book has been updated - thanks Gareth . This includes downloadable versions of the book examples for VS2008.

Having spent a year in the Visual Studio Ecosystem team helping to integrate the DSL Tools deeper into the VS SDK, I am moving back to VSTS Architecture Edition to work on their new set of tools for architects, including UML tools, which are built on...

Jean-Marc has joined our team! He brings some great new ideas and energy to what we're doing and I'm already enjoying working with him.

I spent some of this afternoon looking at a problem reported on the VSX forum . The questioner has customized the designer and is getting multiple entries on the undo stack as a consequence of a single change. I coded up his example, but in my case I...

The VSX Team Blog lists these issues, several of which affect the DSL Tools.

The storyboard designer ( http://www.codeplex.com/storyboarddesigner ) is a great example of how DSL Tools can be used in conjunction with the Visual Studio Shell to create a useful and flexible stand-alone tool. It says the target audience is VSX developers...

If you have great software development skills and want to join the Visual Studio Extensibility team, in UK or USA, Gareth would like to hear from you .

Aaron Ruckman is looking for feedback on your experience of installing and deploying Visual Studio.

Stuart has blogged a roadmap of future plans for DSL Tools.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Barcelona, where TechEd is happening. I'll be there until Sunday. I expect to be at the Visual Studio Extensibility booth tomorrow afternoon.

An old chestnut came up recently: the relationship between "containment" and "cascade delete". Somebody said that this is something inherent in real things and trotted out an old example: a Car has Wheels and when the Car is deleted, so are the Wheels...

See Scott Guthrie's blog . This will make things easier for .NET developers.

Based on much appreciated feedback from my earlier posts, here is my latest version. This one is more compact and expressive, and the Duplicates function scales roughly linearly so I don't think that any performance has been sacrificed for expressive...

In a comment to my last post, Keith Short challenged me to write a version of this constraint with good error reporting, i.e. to post an error to the task list that gives the names of the duplicate properties, and supports navigation to the element that...

Based on Michael Giagnocavo's feedback, here's a cleaner version of my last post. Thanks Michael. [ ValidationState ( ValidationState .Enabled)] public partial class ExampleElement { [ ValidationMethod ( ValidationCategories .Menu | ValidationCategories...

I wanted to investigate using LINQ to write constraints "OCL-style". I made a "minimal language" and added a new NamedDomainClass called Property, embedded in ExampleElement. Then I wrote the following validation method to check that all of the Properties...

I'm back from a very nice family holiday. As announced on the VSX Team Blog the DSL Tools team has joined up with the Visual Studio Ecosystem team. We're working out how to integrate the DSL Tools authoring into the overall VS Extensibility experience...

The recording of the panel session at the recent CG2007 conference on the topic of DSLs vs UML is now available.