Software Factories: Follow-up information from Christian Weyer's presentation at MTUG Dublin

Last week's MTUG Dublin presentation by the ever-enthusiastic Christian Weyer was a talk of two halves. 

His subject matter was Applied Software Factories -- the sort of abstraction that's particularly relevant to architects and "devarchitects."

The first half of his talk offered a high-level overview of the motivation for Software Factories and Domain-Specific Languages.  The second half was a deep dive, using extensions to Visual Studio, that provided a case study of how to use artifacts of a Software Factory to model distributed systems. 

Slides from Christian's presentation are now available at the MTUG site (and a video is to follow).  The slide deck is quite comprehensive and should give you a flavour for what he covered.  Judging by the number of thoughtful questions Christian was asked throughout his presentation -- especially during the first half -- I'd say he hit the mark with this one!

[Update: On the subject of software factories, I've been reading Windows Communication Foundation Hands-On by Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri and Nigel Watling.  It is my favorite WCF book to date.  Its Fundamentals chapter contains a very thoughtful explanation of how WCF constitutes a software factory template for software communications.  The authors also use the Windows Forms Designer as a fine example of a software factory template, with the Windows Forms Designer being the domain-specific language, the Toolbox and Property Editor being among the terms of the language, and the classes in the System.Windows.Forms namespace of the .NET Framework Class Library constituting the class framework.  Users of the Windows Forms Designer use it to model software that gets generated from those classes.

The authors of WCF Hands-On refer to Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools as a book that introduces the Software Factories concepts.]