It’s been a while since I wrote about the progress of my DSL experiment. Why does it take so long? Is it so hard to build a DSL? Well, actually sometimes I think it is. It takes some time to really understand what is going on in all the files that are part of the DSL solution. Most of this is because of the technology preview status of the toolkit and therefore the limited documentation that is available. In the current release some of the files have to be maintained by hand which can only be done if you have a good understanding of the xml structure of the files. Most of this manual work will disappear in the next release of the toolkit. Luckily there is an active forum and the DSL Toolkit team that is willing to help!

But, let’s continue on the status. Three weeks ago Christian Weyer of Thinktecture contacted me to let me know he liked the work I am doing in my DSL experiment. As you can read in this post on his blog Christian is thinking about using DSL’s for modelling service interfaces and data contracts for some time. We decided to discuss this “service modelling” domain via email and to join forces and build this language together.

So, the last few weeks we discussed the artifacts that can be identified within the service domain and how to model them in our DSL. As a result some of the names of the concepts that I modelled in an early version of the language have changed to make them more descriptive and some new concepts are introduced. Currently I am making the last changes in the model. After that we have to finish the designer for the language and finally we can do some code generation. In another post I will show a next version of the model and hopefully explain some of the ideas behind it.

Hopes this clears thinks up. The experiment is not dead. Expect to hear of it a lot more in the coming days, weeks, months.

To be continued…