DSL Tools has moved and I've pimped

I've been pretty off the pace on blogging, but there's a reason. Well OK, an excuse ;-)

As James points out, the DSL Tools team has just made a move into the core of Visual Studio in the Visual Studio eXtensibility Ecosystem team (or VSX as we like to call it). As with all moves there's been a lot to sort out, but we're settling down again now into a new rhythm.

This really came about as we recognized that DSL Tools was the first piece of the Software Factory platform to gain a critical mass of folks building on it both outside and now inside Microsoft. The fact that our runtime is in the box for every copy of Visual Studio 2008 and we're supporting deploying your DSLs standalone in the Visual Studio 2008 Shell should see us reach a wider audience still.

This is pretty exciting and challenging stuff for us all, as we get to both broaden and deepen our mission.

Clearly we'll be investing in making DSL Tools do even more with even less effort.

At the same time, we're all keen to apply domain-specific modeling techniques to the broader area of Visual Studio eXtensibility.  It's pretty easy to get started building a complex VS extension like a DSL using a model.  Surely it should be just as easy to build a range of other extensions.

Watch this space.

I'd like to say we'll miss the good folks over in Team Architect that helped us incubate DSL Tools, but we talk to them nearly as much as ever.  Now they're our first and best internal customer!  A big thank you to them.

To celebrate this merger of two fab teams, I've pimped my blog into the VSX house style. For those of you that read it in a browser, enjoy!