Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit
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The Web Service Software Factory is now maintained by the community and can be found on the Service Factory site. This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. Retired: November 2011 |
The Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit is a Visual Studio-integrated tool that can be used to build custom modeling tools. You can use DSL Toolkit to design and generate visual designers that are customized for your problem domain. For example, you can create a tool to describe concepts that are specific to how your organization models business processes. If you are building a state chart tool, you can describe what a state is, what properties a state has, what kinds of states exist, how transitions between states are defined, and so on. A state chart that describes the status of contracts in an insurance company is superficially similar to a state chart that describes user interaction among pages on a Web site. However, their underlying concepts differ significantly. By creating your own domain-specific language and custom generated designer, you can specify exactly what state chart concepts you need in your tool and what code should be generated from them.
DSL SDK is part of the Visual Studio SDK, and the DSL documentation is a section of the Visual Studio SDK documentation (you need Visual Studio SDK to work with Web Service Software Factory Modeling Edition). However, the best source of information and education about the DSL Toolkit is the book written by the members of the DSL team titled Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools.