Steve Cook's WebLog

The new version of DSL Tools is out now - see Gareth's blog for details.

Oh. I have been tagged by Tad Anderson . I never do chain letters. But I suppose this is different. Here are the 5 things you probably don't know about me: 1. My first programming job was in 1965 writing programs in machine code for a Ferranti computer...

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the latest Community...

There's a nice plug for our work on Soma's blog - Somasegar is the corporate vice president of Developer Division.

I've been playing with DSL Tools and the LINQ preview . Apparently the LINQ preview contains an obsolete version of the DSL redist, used for the DLINQ designer. This means that installing the LINQ preview will break your DSL Tools: the symptom is that...

The journal Software and Systems Modeling is having a special issue about Metamodeling. The call for papers can be found here .

Issue 9 has articles by Jack Greenfield, Marcel de Vries, Tom Fuller, Steve Eadie, Lewis Curtis and George Cerbone, and me.

Back to work today. I spent quite a bit of time over the holidays reading through the draft of our forthcoming DSL Tools book. There's still some reorganization to do - with four authors it can be tricky to co-ordinate the order in which information is...

Another product based on DSL Tools can be seen at www.tangiblearchitect.com/tour

I thoroughly enjoyed this .

I found the Babel Experiment described here very interesting. It claims to show that if you only allow people to use UML and not to talk, you get a better result than if you allow them to talk. The better result is only that "their diagrams were more...

We've released DSL Tools V1 - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/DSLTools/ . Hardware permitting, I'll be demoing them at JAOO in a couple of weeks. (I'm currently trying to get Vista RC1 on my Toshiba Tecra M5 to talk properly to data projectors)...

I gave a keynote talk this morning at JMLC2006 in Oxford, about Domain Specific Languages. To be controversial, I said that the most important development in programming language design ever was the shift from procedure/data languages to class/instance...

David Anderson has blogged about Alan Wills moving to the MSF team. Alan has been a mainstay of the DSL Tools team for the past 3 years, and we will miss him, including our forum readers, whom he has supported very consistently and thoroughly. Having...

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope...

I'm just back from a very nice family holiday in Greece, and I'm catching up. We are still looking for great developers to join our team in Cambridge: the job description is at http://members.microsoft.com/careers/international/default.asp?lang=EN&loc...

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.

At this link is an interesting article about how Macaw, a System Integrator based in the Netherlands, is implementing the software factory vision. They are supporting VS2003 and VS2005, and taking a very pragmatic approach. No graphical modelling tools...

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...

Over on Roy Osherove's blog there are some interesting interchanges about the HL7 software factory, triggered by comments by Guy Ron at the Architecture panel at TechEd in Israel, who thinks software factories might be too complicated. I reckon that...

André Furtado's SharpLudus is a very interesting-looking application of the DSL Tools.

There's a nice article on MSDN about using the DSL Tools in EDS's model-driven development approach, which generates entities, data services, data definitions and unit tests.

I'm just back from a very pleasant holiday, which partially explains my recent blogging silence. At http://www.eclipse.org/gmt/am3/zoos/atlanticDSLToolsZoo/ I found 113 domain models generated using the Atlas Transformation Language . This is a good...

Neil Davidson emailed me this interesting comment about my SPA talk. I fully agree with him that we're always going to need craftsmen to produce software, and that the tools they use will change. As with all analogies, the analogy between maturity in...

Last night I spoke at the British Computer Society Software Practice Advancement group's Cambridge branch about Software Factories . We had some interesting discussions. Jeff Veit has posted a very nice review of my talk. Thanks Jeff.