Finally I found some time to document this simple customization to the DSL Tools designers. The requirement is as follows: I have a given domain class - called Module Reference - that has a property called Main. This domain property indicates if that particular class is the "most important" of that kind in the model. This ...

Every once in a while I enter the nightmare of formatting my development machine. :) This time my "wonderful nightmare" was getting Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the Experimental Hive (for my DSL Tools developments) working correctly (with TFS Team Explorer and TFS Source Control working on the Experimental Hive). In the end, I think that ...

IBM has started a series of articles related to Capturing Architectural Decisions at its developerWorks site.This first part of the series presents a domain meta model specifically designed to capture and share architectural decisions and outlines why and how architects should consciously identify, make, and enforce ...

Since I've been doing a number of posts on the DSL Tools, I thought it would be helpful to have a list with all of them: DSL Tools #1 - Preventing Multiple Instances of one Domain Class DSL Tools #2 - Preventing Invalid Connections DSL Tools #3 - Dynamic Default Values for Domain Properties DSL Tools #4 - Add and Change Rules ...

NOTE: The procedure described here is based on the domain model described in this previous post. --- Now for something completely different. As I said before instances of Entity, NormalAttribute, and Calculated attribute are created at runtime when the user "imports" them from another model. When this happens, the entities are also ...

NOTE: The procedure described here is based on the domain model described in this previous post. --- The next thing that I wanted to achieve in my DSL was to prevent the user from deleting manually the instances of certain domain classes. On my example, since all the attributes are created automatically (by code) when each entity is added (also ...

In the next few posts about the DSL tools, I'll be using the following domain model: This model is relatively simple: One model can have multiple entities. One entity can have zero or more normal attributes. One entity can have zero or more calculated attributes. The interesting thing in this model is that the user is not supposed ...

Again working on a new DSL, I was looking for a simple way of adding menus to the my DSL's main designer context menu. In the end I found this great article by Sebastian Talamoni that explains it very well. Here it is: Adding a Menu to a DSL

One of my colleagues pointed me this article by Oleg Sych: How to generate multiple outputs from single T4 template The technique is complex but it does solve one of the worst limitations of the DSL Tools. Nice work.

All the analysis tools that come with Visual Studio 2008, allow you to suppress analysis on files that were automatically generated by tools and are supposed to be regenerated at some point in time. The question is how do these tools know that a code as been generated by a tool? Well, it's very simple. All the classes, members, methods, etc. ...