Last week I did a presentation at the technical university of Vienna on Microsoft’s strategies for modeling and Software Factories. It was a great pleasure and fun for me to deliver this presentation as we had really interesting discussions afterwards with students on these topics.
Below you can find the assets I produced for this presentation as downloads:
PowerPoint Presentation Download (as PDF)
Simple WCF Service Factory Demo
Simple Test DSL created with the VS 2008 SDK
Although I haven’t been blogging a lot about this topic, yet, I strongly believe in this strategy. Especially since I attended the Strategic Architect Forum where Jack Greenfield clarified on some recent developments publicly announced at PDC 2008 last October. The key-questions Jack answered, are for me:
- UML and Microsoft - Why did Microsoft change it’s perception according to UML and includes UML-diagrams with Visual Studio 2010 now while they were claiming it isn’t a core strategy?
Well, simple and pragmatic: my understanding is that we think you can boost your productivity for most software products with factories and DSLs for about 60-80% of the development. For many more “specialized” developments that weren’t part of your product-variation planning for some reasons (e.g. ROI) you still need to have structured processes and ways for covering these parts. This is exactly where UML and other general-purpose modeling-approaches can help, definitely. And I think that besides of the fact that customers want us to support UML, that is the major reason for doing so. - How does the future of DSL-Toolkit look like as Microsoft announced OSLO at PDC in October?
I think the easiest way to answer these questions is taking a look at Jack Greenfields and Stuart Kents blog. Click one of the following links below: - http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2008/11/07/dsl-tools-and-oslo.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2008/11/05/dsl-tools-in-visual-studio-2010.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/softwarefactories/archive/2008/05/26/software-factories-2-0.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/blueprints.aspx
So the answer seems to be pretty simple according to these blog-postings: the much richer successor of GAX/GAT will be Microsoft Blueprints. For DSL Tools and Blueprints the product team wants to have a plan in place for smooth migration. But as I personally think that OSLO will take some more time to complete, I think we have some “time-buffer” here. In the meantime I think DSL-tools are a pretty good way to move on;) Currently I am thinking about creating a DSL for Composite WPF which might be a funny think… depends on how much time I have left in my vacation next week:))
Having that said I wish all of you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year;)
Mario