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Propriety of proprietary

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Just read CSharpeners Blog entry concerning Whitehorse here. I'm glad to see this dialog taking place. The entry was spurred by the article in CNet entitled Microsoft places bet on Whitehorse. I want to pick up on some of the statements made in the article in my next posting, but also wanted to address the CSharpener comment right away. The author states that much progress has been made toward a visual language lingua franca. I agree with this statement in as far as it relates to diagrammatic notation - the UML effort rightly eliminated a confusing number of notations for the same concepts. The problem comes when the development effort switches to a domain not well covered by UML notation or its underlying metamodel, such as Web services or Data center server types (two scenarios we are critically interested in for Visual Studio Whidbey). In these areas there is not really an established lingua franca for us to have chosen. In these domains we have chosen to provide intuitive notations that developers resonate with, which are backed by well-focussed, specific modeling languages (DSLs). In tools we've seen based on UML, the use of weak UML extensibility mechanisms such as stereotypes and tagged values does not allow for true metamodel extensions nor do most UML tools offer an easy way to customise diagram shapes to produce helpful diagrams. As another example, our Whitehorse Class Designer tool uses UML notation but is based on a DSL that accurately models the CLR type system allowing us to keep code and models in sync all the time with no round tripping.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2004
    The phrase "Whitehorse Class Designer tool" has me very excited. Is Whidbey going to have a class designer built into it? I'm a low-level toolkit architect so I spend my day designing framework classes and thinking about how they interact within a single process. Web service interactions are miles above my code, so Whitehorse's ability to model those isn't useful to me.

    What I really need is a good .NET-aware class designer built into VS.NET. I want it to understand the .NET type system and use the CodeDom to always keep my projects and models in sync. Is this something that's in the works or that may ship with Whidbey? You'll make my day if you say yes.

    FWIW, I've been using Rose for years, and I hate it. It tries to be too generic, and now it tries to be too "Java". I really want a .NET-specific class designer. It should be aware of properties, events, delegates, and enums. It should be aware that a class can only have one base class, and that value types can't be inherited. It should be aware of all of .NET's features and limitations. Other class designers try to be too generic. A .NET-specific designer would absolutely, totally rock.
  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2004
    It's nice to be able to make someone's day! But yes, Bill, the Whitehorse Class Designer (final name to be decided) is pretty much what you have decsribed you'd like. I'll add some screen shots and a few more details on another posting next week.
  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2004
    I agree here that something bit more specific that syncs with the developer mindset is welcome.
  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2009
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