What's new for DSL Tools in VS2008 / VS2008 SDK
VS2008 and VS2008 SDK have just shipped. The announcement about the SDK over on the VSX blog didn't get into much detail about changes in DSL Tools for VS2008, so I thought it would be worth summarizing them here:
- The runtime is now part of the VS platform. There is no need for a DSL author to redistribute a separate DSL runtime.
- The authoring experience now works with Vista RANU (Run as Normal User). You don’t have to run VS as an admin in order to develop a DSL.
- We’ve added a path editor to the DSL Designer. Paths are used largely to express mappings between domain classes / relationships and shapes / connectors. The new editor provides UI that allows you to select valid navigation paths through domain classes and relationships in the domain model.
- LINQ can be used in code written against the code generated from a domain model, for example when writing validation constraints or text templates for code generation. For those of you familiar with UML / MOF, LINQ gives you OCL-like querying capability (actually its far more powerful than that) against domain models.
- We’ve fixed a large number of bugs, in both runtime and authoring.
