DSL Tools beyond VS2008

The future of Domain Specific Languages on the Visual Studio platform

Serge van den Oever [Macaw] — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:42:43 GMT

Now Visual Studio 2008 is released (I know, I'm blogger #100.000 to mention this) it is interesting to

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Francois Vanderseypen — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:53:30 GMT

Thanks for this amazing (SDK) piece of software, the scope and possibilities are endless. Even without WPF and all the features you mention for the next release this SDK opens up a whole world.

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

leovernazza — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:56:10 GMT

I would like to have a generated-model without requiring Microsoft's assemblies.

As I am following a <a href="http://www.himalia.net/blogs/leovernazza/2007/11/models-runtime.html">runtime approach</a> for the end-user (not the dsl user, but the end user), I require the model assemblies not only in the dsl user machine but in the end-user one.

I don't want to be tied to the Microsoft policies with my end-user-runtime.. (can I distribute them?, does the user need VS?, etc.)

My approach so far, has been to create my own model, and use the dsl-generated-model as a bridge. It could be far better to automatically use your model... I can also rewrite the model-generation templates. This will be probably my next step...

Thanks for publishing the roadmap...

Visual Studio 2008 SDK Released

Simon Ince's Blog — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:58:21 GMT

I’m sure you know that Visual Studio 2008 has shipped, but did you also know that the Visual Studio 2008

DSL Tools Roadmap

Steve Cook's WebLog — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:53:33 GMT

Stuart has blogged a roadmap of future plans for DSL Tools.

[DSL] Roadmap para el futuro de las DSL Tools

El Bruno — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:51:18 GMT

Buenas hace unos días Stuart Kent nos comentaba en su blog parte de las ideas que guían el Roadmap para

[DSL] Roadmap para el futuro de las DSL Tools

El Bruno — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:51:32 GMT

Buenas hace unos días Stuart Kent nos comentaba en su blog parte de las ideas que guían el Roadmap para

[DSL] Roadmap para el futuro de las DSL Tools

El Bruno — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:51:42 GMT

Buenas hace unos días Stuart Kent nos comentaba en su blog parte de las ideas que guían el Roadmap para

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

BrentP — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:16:35 GMT

"Although it is possible to create a custom editor with a placeholder for you to write your own forms-based editing surface"

Are there any examples or guidiance on this? As this is the exact scenario I'm trying to investigate if DSL Tools is a valid solution for our problem.

I'd love to have the DSL designer in our client winforms app, without having to customize the VS Shell.

DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Aali - a developer's view — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:25:06 GMT

Stuart Kent has posted a roadmap for DSL Tools for VS Rosario and beyond. This one (post-Rosario, ie...

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Stuart Kent — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:20:14 GMT

In response to BrentP:

There's an example of how to do this in our book, with sample code on the website www.domainspecificdevelopment.com

In the DSL Designer, you delete the editor node in the explorer, then add a new custom editor to replace it (note that you'll lose all your toolbox entries when you do this). When you regenerate and rebuild you'll find there is a build error with a comment in the generated code with instructions on the method you need to provide.

Note, however, that we only currently support the scenario where the designer is hosted in a VS shell, including the new customizable, and freely distributable VS2008 shell.

Roadmap for the DSL Tools

Hugo Ribeiro — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:07:28 GMT

This is a development roadmap for the DSL Tools published by Stuart Kent: DSL Tools Beyond VS2008

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Cyril — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:34:06 GMT

Your DSL tools are just purely amazing work.

I made my so-called "AppBuilder" in two months, thanks to them.

I did addressed my own way the orchestrated code generation issue.

In a few words, here's my approach :

* I have an XML config file hosted in a special, fixed-name project of the solution (arbitrarily named "App.Model", but that's held in a registry key, if you don't like this name) which describes commands ("generate the UI, generate the SQL, etc")

* the VS designer (or, rather, the DslPackage) for my DSL implements a context menu which brings up a dialog box (coded once for all) proposing the XML-ized commands in a drop down

* when you select a command in the drop down, the dialog box dynamically compiles a small C# script (also hosted in "App.Model" special project, in a "scripting" folder) and instantiate an object implementing my IScriptedCommandHandler interface (where only one method is surfaced : Execute(...))

* the DslPackage / VS designer for my DSL passes the context (current model element selection and current opened EnvDTE solution in VS) to the scripted interface, allowing it to populate or augment the solution with projects and/or source files generated by the DSL template engine that I call thanks to a technique describe in the DSL tools forums.

I'm rather happy with this : I'm able to generate the parts of my app incrementally (the facades, the business objects, the SQL scripts, the UI, etc) in kind of an on-demand way : you select model elements in the designer, and choose which contextual code generation step to perform on that element.

On an one-gigabyte RAM computer, the memory footprint of dynamically compiling a C# "script" to implement the code generator's command launcher is not big, since, by design, my IScriptedCommandHandler are supposed to be short (less than two hundred lines of code). Of course, that maybe an issue if you leave your VS environment open during several days, with hundreds of right-clicks. But I decided it would "normally" be very seldom the case.

My two cents,

Cyril

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Paul Kinlan — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:28:10 GMT

Hi Stuart, Thanks for publishing the information about the plan. I would honestly like to see "First class support for cross-referencing between different models and multiple views" sooner rather than later.

If it is later, could you either maintain or "open the source" to the DIS powertoy (it contains great references about how to load and inspect the model so that you can cross reference models).

I would also like Microsoft to provide better template highlighting - without the need for clarius 74 template highlighter (it is a great editor however).

I would also like to have the ability have a template run across all models of a certain type so the following template directive:

<#@ DALRepositoryLanguage

processor="DALRepositoryLanguageDirectiveProcessor"

requires="fileName='..\..\..\..\Data Access Model\Sample.repos'" #>

might read:

<#@ DALRepositoryLanguage

processor="DALRepositoryLanguageDirectiveProcessor"

requires="fileName='..\..\..\..\Data Access Model\*.repos'" #>

This will stop me from having to hard code my model file into the template.

Thanks for your time.

Kind Regards,

Paul Kinlan

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Paul Kinlan — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:22:22 GMT

Hi, futhermore to my previous comment.

I would love to see some extra shape types as standard, one such shape could be a UML style lifeline. I belive one could custom code this but it is a lot of effort and would be specfic to a developer and not the community as a whole. Is this type of extensibilty where you see WPF for the designer surface being used?

Kind Regards,

Paul Kinlan

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Paul Kinlan — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:34:39 GMT

Another thing that I would like to see is better support for multiple output files from a single template.

I would also like to see templates be able to perform actions inside vs ide against the ide, such as create project at transform template time.

I would also love to see the directive processor (if I am correct) expose custom events that can be consumed by the application transforming the templates and also have the events triggered by "directives" in the template.

Kind Regards,

Paul Kinlan

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Stuart Kent — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:18:17 GMT

Paul - thanks for all your suggestions.

We hear you on better orchestration for code generation, multiple input/output files etc. and work in that area is on the backlog.

I note your request about doing cross-referencing sooner rather than later.

You can custom code the lifeline ('cos I've seen it done), but you are right that the move to WPF is intended to make it much easier to customize the design surface, as well as open up a new world of possibilities.

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Alain De Preter — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:26:36 GMT

This is indeed the most elegant piece of software I have ever seen (and I really mean it).

Now I guess we agree that DIS is not a serious implementation for cross-referencing. So I would also like to have cross-referencing sooner rather than later.

The current lack of serious cross-referencing is, I believe, the key feature that is preventing unconditional adoption of Microsoft DSLs.

As an example, just think about the enterprise-wide reuse of partial data contracts (in different DSMs) without cross referencing.

Or think about any analysis level language: For example a business process modeling language. Or a language to model scenarios. A language to model human interactions....

These absolutly need easy cross-referencing, because, by definition, they do not represent real implementation that might (as a work around) link different items at the code level (vs at the model level).

Without such cross-referencing features integrated in the DSL toolkit, implementation of DSM interoperability tend to be applied only to situations where each isolated model maps to a specific piece of code and it is some other code (created by hand) that is providing the links.

Thanks to you, we can raise the level of abstraction using discrete DSMs. It would be really great if we could raise the level of abstraction on DSM references, views, composition and navigation as well... sooner than later.

Cheers

Alain

VSX Community Letter for January 2008

VSX Team Blog — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:12:35 GMT

This month's letter includes information about what the VSX team has been working on in the past few

re: DSL Tools beyond VS2008

suyog kale — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:29:16 GMT

hi,

presently i am working on DSL tools +VS2008 but i dont know enything about it, is there any samples how to quickstart with DSL tools in VS2008

MS Software Factories...

Infosys | Microsoft — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:04:34 GMT

There are some rumbling on the software factories from MS. It has been nearly 4 years since Jack Greenfield articulated Microsoft Software factories vision. He talked about state of software engineering in his famous book.

stuart kent's blog : DSL Tools beyond VS2008

Dating — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:16:53 GMT

I promised a while ago to publish a roadmap for what we're doing with DSL Tools, post VS2008. Now that VS2008 and the VS2008 SDK have just shipped (thanks Gareth for providing a post which points at both announecements) now seems a good time honour tha