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Visual Studio 2010 and DSL Toolkit SDK Beta Now Available

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The Visual Studio platform team has just announced the availability of the VS 2010 SDK beta! This is great stuff, and includes lots of new features around the new Editor that is part of 2010, as well as the new work we have poured into the DSL Toolkit.

Here's a link to the SDK.

One of the changes we've done this turn of the crank is to move the DSL Toolkit out of the main SDK, but be sure to make available the Toolkit whenever the SDK releases. We've done this for a number of reasons ( minimize download times, more flexibility to deliver bits more often, etc. ).

If you download the SDK, there will be a link to the DSL Toolkit bits from the Start Menu. That link will take you directly to the download page, which is here.

To get an idea of what's new in the DSL Toolkit in the beta, please check out this page. But for the impatient, here's a snippet:

"In Visual Studio 2010, the F5 experience is improved, and deployment of a DSL considerably simplified, exploiting the extension manager in the Visual Studio platform and the new facilities in the Visual Studio SDK top create a VSIX package which is a simple zip archive that unpacks itself into the User’s extensions folder.
Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 also brings 11 new DSL features:

  1. Different models can now interact with each other, (and with Visual Studio Team System Architecture UML designers), using the ModelBus. A DSL author can choose to generate a ModelBus adapter, that will expose his model to other models or tools.
  2. Databinding support has been added, allowing Windows.Forms and WPF form-based designers to be created by binding a standard winform or WPF-based UI directly to DSL models. This enables developers to quickly create designers such as the .ResX or .settings designers in Visual Studio.
  3. It is now possible to have completely or partially read only models, which can be used for instance by reviewing and commenting tools.
  4. A number of UI enhancements have been added, including :
    • moveable labels for connectors,
    • sticky toolbox (when the user double-clicks on an item in the toolbox,it’s not necessary to return to the toolbox for repeated applications of the tool),
    • quick navigation and editing of compartments with the keyboard
    • Copy and paste of diagram elements to images (in Bitmap and .wmf/emf)
    • Copy and paste of model elements in or between diagrams
  1. The notion of DslLibrary has been introduced. This enables factorizing and componentizing DSLs (for instance having several domain models have the same base-domain class). The authoring for this feature will not be present in Beta1
  2. The DSLs can now be extended by third parties after they have deployment. The authoring for this feature will not be present in Beta1"

The team has worked extremely hard to hit this date, and in fact have shipped earlier than previously scheduled! This is a great milestone! :)

If you caught my talk at TechEd last week in LA, you can take out all those new capabilities that I demonstrated out for a test drive yourself.

Enjoy!

Cameron

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