MVP
30 Jun 2008

Steve Cook just announced that he is moving to the VSTS Architect Edition team, to work with Cameron Skinner building UML tools for Rosario on top of the DSL Tools. As you may recall, we can expect these five UML 2.1 diagram implementations in Rosario, built on top of the DSL toolkit:

  • Class Diagram
  • Use Case Diagram
  • Component Diagram
  • Sequence Diagram
  • Activity Diagram

The fact that these are built on top of the DSL toolkit may provide interesting integration options with additional DSLs, e.g. if we can use the “Designer Bus” (a.k.a. “backplane”) for that (see the Software Factories in Rosario CTP post series by Edward Bakker for details: part 3, part 4 and part 5).

Stuart Kent gives some more hints in this post about interesting integration and extensibility options for these designers:

“Worth calling out are the features to allow a designer to be extended with new metadata once it has been deployed, and support for designers and models to interact. This will allow the designers delivered by Team Architect to be extended, and for new, third party DSLs to interact with them. Both these are key aspects of connecting UML with DSLs in the UML + DSL story that Cameron speaks about.”

I’m happy with this design decision by MS.

I like an approach that enables pragmatic solutions today while still moving toward the overall Factories vision. In realizing the factories vision at Macaw with the Macaw Solutions Factory, we use this type of pragmatic approach all the time, and it works great for us. I even think that such an approach is necessary if you ever want to actually arrive at the full vision (see my post on Factories 2.0).

It looks more and more like the Rosario release will really bring modeling to the masses, this will provide a lot more added value for the VSTS Architect Edition.

About the Author
Vincent Hoogendoorn is a Microsoft MVP Developer Technologies with over 20 years of experience as hands-on .NET innovator / architect / engineer. He is currently focused on full stack C#: Microsoft Orleans backends and browser/native frontends with C# Markup 2 for Windows App SDK, Uno Platform and Xamarin/Maui. Xamarin cross-platform mobile veteran, passionate about developer productivity. Principal Software Engineer at InnoWvate.NET, Technical Director at Applicita.

Leave a Reply


*

captcha *