Ramblings about Domain Specific Languages and how to build them.
I am proud to present the first episode of Industry Vertical the twice monthly net cast about industrializing software development with Software Factories, Guidance Automation and Domain Specific Languages at http://tinyurl.com/6gjlgl. This episode starts out with the basics of Software Factories and trys to answer the question "What is a Software Factory".
Sometimes when defining a property for a domain model element you may need to use a complex type that has more than one property or can't easily be displayed using a single text field or drop down in the property editor. A good example might be a class that holds a list of strings for a GUI interface or a Rich Text editor for a custom text field required by your framework. To resolve this you can create a custom editor and hook it into your domain model that will provide a proper user interface to ......
I've been needing a tailored version of the Web Service Software Factory to simplify the design and creation of web services for my development team. Not that the Service Factory isn't easy to use, but my team has to design and build services that use industry standard schemas as well as invoke workflows. So, I figured extending the the service factory would allow me to tailor it to my team's needs and by using some of the new features in the v3b117 Alpha I could keep the modifications simple. Granted, ......
In my last post I discussed some of the other life cycle artifacts that I thought should be included in a Software Factory. In this post I'll show how to use T4 templates to generate a Use Case document from an XML data file. To do this we can invoke a Custom Directive from within a Text Template to parse the XML file and reformat in to an HTML Document. The MSDN's DSL Tools documentation provides a great example on how to create a Custom Text Template Directive Processor I've modified the class, ......
I've been involved in DSLs and Software Factories for about six months now, before that I dabbled in building DSLs trying to see how I could use them in enhancing the development experience for both developers and non-developers. One of the big problems I came across is the lack of a single reference that provided the necessary background information required to assemble a Software Factory. Granted the MSDN provides all of the documentation on-line and you have the various community sites, but there ......