stuart kent's blog : UML

Empirical assessment of the efficacy of MDE: Can you help?

Stuart Kent — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:23:44 GMT

I’m lending my support to a research project which is trying to assess the effectiveness of MDE. The project is being led by Jon Whittle, who’s now a professor at the University of Lancaster in the UK. Details of the project can be found at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~eamde. Personally, I’m hoping this project will not only shed some light on whether or not MDE is effective (I’ve heard enough hearsay evidence to suggest that it is in some situations), but more importantly what are the factors that contribute to it’s effectiveness, and are these factors unique to MDE or do they come into play whatever software development methodology you use.

The project is just starting up and Jon and his team would now like to interview people with experience of applying MDE (Model Driven Engineering) techniques in practice. The interviews will take no more than 30 minutes and be conducted by phone. If you are interested, please could you contact Jon, or his associate John Hutchinson, giving some indication of your affiliation and experience in applying MDE techniques. Contact details can be found at the above link.

There’s also an online survey which you can fill out: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~eamde/site/content_survey.php.

Thanks in advance for helping.

Extending UML designers in VS2010 Beta2

Stuart Kent — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:37:27 GMT

As mentioned in this post, the UML designers in VS2010 Ultimate now come with a set of APIs that makes them easy to extend. I see that Peter Provost has now posted the first of a series of articles (going by the title of this one) explaining how to get started: Extending Visual Studio 2010 UML Designers – Part 1- Getting Started.

DSL Tools and Oslo

Stuart Kent — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:07:26 GMT

The Oslo modeling platform was announced at Microsoft's PDC and we've been asked by a number of customers what the relationship is between DSL Tools and Oslo. So I thought it would be worth clearing the air on this. Keith Short from the Oslo team has just posted on this very same question. I haven’t much to add really, except to clarify a couple of things about DSL Tools and VSTS Team Architect.

As Keith pointed out, some commentators have suggested that DSL Tools is dead. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Keith himself points out that "both products have a lifecycle in front of them". In DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010 I summarize the new features that we're shipping for DSL Tools in VS 2010, and we'll be providing more details in future posts. In short, the platform has expanded to support forms-based designers and interaction between models and designers. There's also the new suite of designers from Team Architect including a set of UML designers and technology specific DSLs coming in VS 2010. These have been built using DSL Tools. Cameron has blogged about this, and there are now some great videos describing the features, including some new technology for visualizing existing code and artifacts. See this entry from Steve for details.

The new features in DSL Tools support integration with the designers from team architect, for example with DSLs of your own, using the new modelbus, and we're exploring other ways in which you can enhance and customize those designers without having to taking the step of creating your own DSL. Our T4 text templating technology will also work with these designers for code generation and will allow access to models across the modelbus. You may also be interested in my post Long Time No Blog, UML and DSLs which talks more about the relationship between DSLs and UML.

DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010

Stuart Kent — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:27:45 GMT

The first public CTP of Visual Studio 10

Anyone attending or watching the goings on at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) will have heard about the next version of Visual Studio.

If you were at PDC, you will have received a VPC containing a Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 10. If you were not, you might know that you can download it at: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP.

What about the DSL Tools?

If you are interested in the DSL Tools, and try this CTP, you might be disappointed not to find anything new in DSL Tools. This doesn't mean we haven't been busy. In fact we've been developing a number of highly-requested new features, but unfortunately did not get these integrated into this CTP release. We'll share them with customers in our next preview release.

Also, in the CTP you'll find a suite of new designers from Team Architect, including a set of UML designers. These have all been built using DSL Tools, and some of the new features we're delivering are directly to support this effort.

The new features

So what are the new features then? Below is a summary. They've been driven by a combination of supporting internal teams such as Team Architect, and responding to customer feedback. We'll blog more about these features over the coming weeks, including, we hope, publishing some videos demo'ing them as a taster whilst you wait for the next preview.

Dsl Libraries. Share fragments of DSL definitions between different designers.

Dsl extensibility. Extend the domain model and behavior for a DSL after it's been deployed, including DSLs shipped by a third party.

Readonly. Selectively switch off the ability to edit models and model elements in a designer.

Forms-based UI. Easily bind models to winforms and WPF-based forms UI. IMS now implements the necessary databinding interfaces.

Modelbus. A new piece of platform to support cross-referencing between models and interaction between designers. This has been one of customers' main requests.

T4 precompile. Precompile text templates so that they can be deployed for use on machines that do not have VS installed. (This applies to scenarios where text templates take inputs from data sources other than DSL models. We've had requests from internal teams to use text templates in scenarios which don't use models created from DSLs.)

UI enhancements:

Moveable labels on the connectors (moveably can be activated
Sticky tools in the toolbox
Quick navigation and editing of compartments
Copy and paste of selection as BMP and EMF images
Copy and paste of elements in the same or in different diagrams

Long Time No Blog, UML and DSLs

Stuart Kent — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:32:15 GMT

Technorati Tags: DSL Tools,UML

Embarrassing, but true. Last time I blogged was back in February.

I'm on one of my regular trips to Redmond, and jet lag still means I'm getting up at 4am. Usually on these trips I use the early morning to do a bit of work, then go for a run. However, last trip I stumbled on a tree root when out running and fractured my ankle. It's the first time I've broken a bone, so I didn't know what to expect. In fact, at first I didn't really believe the doctor; x-ray looked fine to me. Little did I expect that I'd be back in Redmond 7 weeks later, still limping and definitely unable to run. So I find myself with more time in the morning, and an opportunity to contribute once again to the blogsphere, though any readership I may have had has probably already given up on me.

So what's there to talk about. As the title suggests, I thought I would touch on the subject of UML and DSLs given a recent post on UML + DSL from Cameron Skinner, who now leads Visual Studio Team Architect. In the article, Cameron talks about a new set of designers that Team Architect are working on, which includes some UML designers, as well as some graphical DSLs. The goal is to 'make modeling more central to a broader range of people' as well as to 'seamlessly connect the two approaches [UML and DSL]'. We've found that DSL Tools is very appealing to customers who've already bought into modeling. It allows them to create their own customized model driven solutions fairly quickly. However, for those not already into modeling it's a harder sell (although, we have had customers who have seen what others have produced and decide to build something similar which focuses on their domain). To really get modeling out to a broader audience it's necessary to have tools that people can use straight out of the box. I'm still convinced that if you want to dramatically increase productivity then you should be using DSLs driving code generators, or further model transformations, or visualizing abstractions discovered from existing artifacts, or some combination of all three. On the other hand, whatever your views are about the effectiveness or not of UML, it has significantly raised the awareness of modeling with a broad audience and it is something that many people are familiar with. So I'm really pleased that Team Architect has now stepped up to drive a strategy that delivers on both sides of the modeling coin, and connects them up.

What is more, I'm really enjoying helping them deliver on this strategy by providing a great platform to build on. Because, as Cameron points out, many of the designers being built by Team Architect (including the UML ones) are being built on the DSL Tools platform. Not only is this further proof for the robustness and flexibility of this platform, it is also helping to drive new features into the platform which will benefit anyone wanting to build their own DSLs. We're not ready to talk about those features in detail yet, but my list posted a few months ago is still fairly accurate, although there are a couple of additions and some changes in priority. Worth calling out are the features to allow a designer to be extended with new metadata once it has been deployed, and support for designers and models to interact. This will allow the designers delivered by Team Architect to be extended, and for new, third party DSLs to interact with them. Both these are key aspects of connecting UML with DSLs in the UML + DSL story that Cameron speaks about.

Finally, you may also have noticed that Steve is changing his role, by going back to Team Architect in order to help them deliver on the UML + DSL vision. This means that Steve will be more of a consumer of the platform that he helped create, and I'm sure will be driving hard to ensure that it meets his needs. Steve and I still share an office in the UK and will still be working closely together. Should be a fun ride, this.