Steve Cook's WebLog

Grady has blogged about Microsoft’s position on UML . His article is a masterpiece of technopolitical spin. He says Microsoft “rejects UML”, and of course we don’t; as my colleague Alan Cameron Wills says, “we don’t want to limit ourselves to UML as a...

I’d like to explore the idea that UML could be made more useful to mainstream developers if it were redesigned so that a UML model could directly represent the semantics and terminology of modern programming languages. For example, if you are working...

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...

The new release of our DSL Tools is available now, as announced by Gareth.

We’re currently doing a major cleanup and revision of the APIs of the DSL Tools. An aspect of this is a systematic renaming so that the API is a better match to the concepts we are dealing with. One thing we decided to do is get rid of the Meta… prefix...

See the DSL Tools web page for details on the latest preview of the DSL Tools. Here's what the link says: About the Latest CTP The latest CTP (in the June CTP of Visual Studio 2005 SDK) brings the Domain-Specific Language tools much closer to their...

We’ve received a couple of questions on the DSL Tools Forum which I thought I’d expand upon here. The questions are: - Why don’t we use UML to define our metamodels? - Why don’t we use MOF to define our metamodels? To answer these effectively, it’s...

Today at OOPSLA I participated in a panel session about MDA . We had an interesting debate about what MDA actually is. I suggested that MDA proponents fall into the following three camps. 1. The UML PIM camp: MDA involves the use of UML to build Platform...

So what really is the difference between syntax and semantics in UML? Firstly there is the notation, or concrete syntax. This defines what shapes are allowed on the diagrams: rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, solid, dashed, compartments, annotations...

I saw my first copy of our book on Saturday at the CodeGen 2007 conference in Cambridge - Jos Warmer asked me to sign his copy. It's rather fatter than I expected - runs to 523 pages. Today I received my own copy. Addison-Wesley have done a great job...

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...

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 the OMG meeting in Santa Clara. We talked a lot about the future of UML. Just about everybody is agreed that we need to create UML 3, but there are some real practical dilemmas. Currently UML is complicated and it can take a lot of expertise...

Next week several of us will be at TechEd in Amsterdam. I'll be giving a talk on "Building and Using a Software Factory" together with Annie Matthewman: we're going to demonstrate using GAT together with the DSL Tools to build a simple smart client application...

Jochen has announced the new version of DSL Tools.

Are you an outstanding .Net developer? Would you like to work in Cambridge (UK) helping us build our Software Factories platform? If so, send me an email.

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...

I had a conversation recently in which the following three use cases for UML were suggested: UML as a precise graphical representation of existing programming languages UML as a higher level full life-cycle development language UML as a means to communicate...

I just arrived back from the Object Management Group’s September meeting in Cambridge (the one across the river from Boston, not the one in UK where I went to university and go to work). I want to make UML more relevant to mainstream developers...

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...

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

We've finished proofreading our book and it should be available within a month.

Last week I attended an OMG meeting for the first time in almost 6 years. If you don’t know, the OMG – Object Management Group – is the organization that specifies UML, as well as a lot of related specifications such as BPMN and MOF, and some unrelated...

The September preview of the DSL Tools is now available. This version has samples to help you start with various popular styles of modelling: class diagrams, activity diagrams, and use case diagrams. You can use these as starting points for your own designers...

I'm back in the office now from a very energizing TechEd in Amsterdam. My overall impression is that a small but significant proportion of our audience really "gets it" about software factories and DSLs. This is measured by some extremely positive feedback...