Support for DSL's in Visual Studio.NET

Published Thu, Oct 28 2004 9:13 AM
Another one of the Microsoft announcements around Visual Studio 2005 that I like. Microsoft announced how they will support DSL's in Visual Studio. DSL stands for Domain Specific Language and describes problems in specific space.
 
Visual Studio 2005 will allow you to create designers for your own DSL. Imagine you created a very flexible, highly configurable platform product, that uses one huge unmanagable unreadable XML-file to drive it's configuration (my collegues know which XML-file I refer to ;-). To ease configuration, you can write a designer on top of the XML file, that allows you to visually create all the settings you need. I think that can be a big help in these kind of problems. Just imagine your XML file describes the service interaction in your Service Oriented environment, then all of sudden your DSL designer will allow you to see and compose your service interaction visually. Now, I think that is cool. 
 
[UPDATE: S Dot One correctly pointed out I screwed up in definitions. Fixed!]
by Carlo Poli
Filed under:

Comments

# Carlo Poli said on Monday, November 01, 2004 11:41 AM

I might be wrong, but doesn't a domain specific language just means a language which you use to solve a problem in a certain domain.

C# can be a DSL, but UML can also be an DSL. I think you're refering to MDA.

# Carlo Poli said on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 11:17 AM

A tech preview is available!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=673a0b3a-f631-4310-8599-8bb55d15f017&displaylang=en