Session with my current view on Microsoft’s Modeling Strategies: DSLs, UML and Software Factories
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of giving a session on Microsoft’s strategy on modeling, model driven architecture and it’s software factories idea. As last year it was great giving the session and I had much fun with it.
Note: I’ve included screen-shots of the demos I built during the session in the presentation for the sake of completeness.
Click here to download the presentation I gave.
Click here to download supporting demo projects.
What do you need for opening the demos:
Visual Studio 2008 Professional or higher
Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
Essentially the story summarized:
- I think we still believe in software factories, but in a much more pragmatic way than at the very beginnings. As you can see, patterns and practices is working on upcoming releases of all our simple factories for Visual Studio 2010.
- I personally believe DSLs will take off as soon as building DSLs will get much easer. It’s still a path we have to go, but it’s good to know that Microsoft follows this path consequently by improving DSL tools and Visual Studio extensibility.
- We provide and improve our ability in Visual Studio to build Domain Specific Languages and extend Visual Studio with automated tasks in a very consistent way with Visual Studio 2010 (especially ultimate).
- New is our position to UML: with Visual Studio 2010 we started fully supporting the most important UML 2.x diagram types with artifacts needed most of the time. The UML tools are built based on an engine in Visual Studio combined with DGML and the DSL-toolkit which underpins the previous two points. The only caveat is that we just support reverse engineering with the current 2010-version of the diagrams. But I am confident that more will come, especially because the team built really an extensible modeling-engine into the tool-set with VS 2010!!
If you want to read more on current activities around UML, DSLs, the DSL toolkit and the Visual Studio SDK, I’d recommend you check-out the following blogs:
https://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/tags/Architecture+Edition/default.aspx
https://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/tags/DSL+Tools/default.aspx