DSL Tools and Oslo

  • Article

The Oslo modeling platform was announced at Microsoft's PDC and we've been asked by a number of customers what the relationship is between DSL Tools and Oslo. So I thought it would be worth clearing the air on this. Keith Short from the Oslo team has just posted on this very same question. I haven’t much to add really, except to clarify a couple of things about DSL Tools and VSTS Team Architect.

As Keith pointed out, some commentators have suggested that DSL Tools is dead. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Keith himself points out that "both products have a lifecycle in front of them". In DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010 I summarize the new features that we're shipping for DSL Tools in VS 2010, and we'll be providing more details in future posts. In short, the platform has expanded to support forms-based designers and interaction between models and designers. There's also the new suite of designers from Team Architect including a set of UML designers and technology specific DSLs coming in VS 2010. These have been built using DSL Tools. Cameron has blogged about this, and there are now some great videos describing the features, including some new technology for visualizing existing code and artifacts. See this entry from Steve for details.

The new features in DSL Tools support integration with the designers from team architect, for example with DSLs of your own, using the new modelbus, and we're exploring other ways in which you can enhance and customize those designers without having to taking the step of creating your own DSL. Our T4 text templating technology will also work with these designers for code generation and will allow access to models across the modelbus. You may also be interested in my post Long Time No Blog, UML and DSLs which talks more about the relationship between DSLs and UML.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/11/dsl-tools-and-oslo/

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    Ok, it seems that the two are not that separate after all, at least from a future direction point of...

  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2008
    DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2008
    This week in the blog carnival modeling, T4, C# 4.0, framework desing, SOA, performance and ASP.NET related

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2008
    So after all the excitement of the PDC, now TechEd Europe is upon us and we're finally talking in some

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2008
    Hi, Some questions about these points : My first impression is that DSL tools are less tied with an objective than Oslo. I already saw a work where one person created a tool to model game scenarios with DSL Tools. Is this first impression right or wrong ? Second, one more specific point is the modeling graphics created with VS 2010. We have use cases, sequential diagrams, class designer, but Oslo, may be 5 months later VS 2010 being shipped, will have all these diagrams too. How these two technologies will work together in this case ? Thanks !

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2008
    Last week I did a presentation at the technical university of Vienna on Microsoft's strategies for modeling

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2009
    The comment has been removed