Tuesday, February 07, 2006

New DSL Toolkit Drop

I have been so focused on Web 2.0 stuff that I've been reading a bunch of new blogs and disregarding the old ones I used to read. So I didn't realize until today that the DSL Tools team released a new drop last week. According to Gareth, the highlights include:

• Integration into the Visual Studio SDK. According to the site, they are shooting for an April release for v2 of the VS2005 SDK, so does that mean the DSL Tools will be done in April?
• Single file format and complete visual designer for all aspects of a DSL. I'm guessing this mean we no longer have to edit the designer definition by hand. That's a good thing. But I liked the seperation of domain model and designer, so I'll be interested to see how I like what they've built.
• Domain-specifiic model serialization. This is huge - previously, the domain model dictated the XML serialization format. Now, if you can customize this, you can provide a clean model syntax and even possibly read in other syntaxes as well
• Port Shapes and a revised modeling API

Update: Apparently, I can't read. Only the VS SDK integration is done in this build. improvements to the file format and model serialization will be in the next drop.