Announcing Designer Integration PowerToy

We've just released a powertoy for the DSL tools that provides some basic functionality for integrating multiple DSLs.

You can downloaded it from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bfba74af-4f28-44cc-8de5-0c3c55d21863&displaylang=en

From the readme:

This powertoy shows how to integrate models from one or more DSL Tools designers
to provide a cohesive authoring and usage experience.

The DIS is a service added to Visual Studio, whose goal is to support referencing
of model elements across DSL Tools designers.

The powertoy provides model element picker logic and simple UI built on that logic to create cross-references within models. It then provides a VS service to resolve those references back to real model elements on demand.

This powertoy isn't our final solution in this area - that will come after Orcas as part of our broader investment in software factories; that's why we've given it a powertoy status and not provided a redistribtable.  However, it should hopefully unblock customers who want to try this type of functionality out and go for the "Jos Warmer approach" of working with small, targetted DSLs languages focussed on a few concerns each.

We'd be really interested to hear what your specific needs are in this area after playing with the powertoy.  As always, please post your experiences in the forum.