September, 2005

A new release of DSL Tools is now available. You can dowload it from:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=43636

The readme included in the zip file provides more information. This is hot off the press - the updates to the main DSL Tools site haven't filtered through yet.

The list of known issues that accompanies this release is at:

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/workshop/DSLTools/knownissues/default.aspx

This release still works with VS2005 Beta2 - same as the May release. Quoting from the readme, new this release:

• Numerous bug fixes and resolution of known issues.
• Replacement of the 'Blank Language' template with the 'Minimal Language' template. This is about the smallest DSL you could create, consisting of: two domain classes, two relationships (an embedding and a reference relationship), one box and one line. In response to feedback received, we have changed the terminology used in this template to be more concrete, less esoteric (e.g. ExampleClass instead of ConceptA). This also makes some of the walkthroughs easier to follow.
• Three new templates: Class Diagrams, Activity Diagrams and Use Case Diagrams. These provide starting points for the many users who wish to base their DSL on a UML notation, and provide some richer samples of what can be built with DSL tools. These samples are completely generated from DSL definitions (domain model in a dsldm file, and a notation definition in a dsldd file). As we enrich the feature set of DSL Tools we will be enriching these templates and removing some of their current limitations, as well as adding new templates. We'll also be showing customers how designers can be further enriched through code customizations, as we finalize the APIs for version 1.

As Jochen points out, our next release should be available very soon after the RTM release of VS2005, and will work with that release. Other features planned for that release, are:

• Deployment - you add a setup project to your designer authoring solution, build that project and get delivered an MSI
• Validation - a framework that makes it easy to write well-formedness constraints, with accompanying error messages, and have them validated from various launch points in the designer.

[edited to update link to download page, instead of the file itself]

If you're interested in Workflow then you'll want to have a look at Windows Worflow Foundation, announced at last week's PDC. Here are some links to get you going:

The main page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/workflow/

An introductory article.

Dave Green's blog. Dave is the architect of Windows Workflow.