Now that the announcement has been made, I can blog about some interesting technology coming from Microsoft. Jochen Seemann gave us a preview of this in Redmond during a Team System devlab, but we were given staunch “Shhhhhh”s until OOPSLA.
The technology relates to a metadata framework featuring the “DSL (Domain-Specific Languages) Toolkit”. The easiest way to describe it is to quote Microsoft - “a new framework and tool for building custom visual designers based on the modeling technology in Visual Studio 2005.“
This is related to the recent Software Factories movement. From what I've seen, you can map the concepts of your own domain/company/industry/environment to a foundation of abstractions, then create a domain-specific language and use the DSL Toolkit with Visual Studio to help generate applications based on the specifics of your domain. (“Domain“ and “abstractions“ are members of that magical set of words which induce instantaneous and deep slumber in audiences. Be strong and fight the sleepies. Some interesting stuff is coming out of this.)
Pictures may be the best way to convey concepts: http://weblogs.asp.net/GarethJ/archive/2004/10/27/248745.aspx
Microsoft will make more available (namely the Object Model Editor) soon. Keep checking http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/teamsystem/workshop/ for details.
Harry Pierson, Stuart Kent, Rob Caron and Steve Cook have plenty of content on this.
Note: This technology has the codename “Corona“. Unfortunately, the codename “Corona“ was also used in 2002 for a version of Windows Media, so your Google searches may turn up red herrings.
Some related articles:
This should enable some very interesting possibilities. I'm very interested to see how these possibilities map to the realities of software development. Stay tuned!
-Chris