Great news! The DSL Team just released a guide that describes how to customize the features and capabilities of the DSL Toolkit (September CTP). Thanks guys!

This guide describes for example how to use custom code to create: “transparent text decorators”, straight lines, shadow and gradients, container object, etc. All techniques that can dramatically improve the modelling experience of your DSL.

A lot of other interesting features are covered in this document including the explaining code samples. Of course al of this is subject to change in the next releases of the Toolkit. But if you don’t like that, don’t use CTP products and wait for the V1 release!

Anyone interested in this guide, go get it following this link to the DSL Toolkit forum.

Have fun and expect a lot of the features described in this guide in the DSL we are building.

It’s been some time since I wrote about the progress of the DSL we are working on. Not because there is no progress anymore but mostly because I am very busy with my regular work so I simply have no time left to write a post. It’s still my intention to have the DSL fully operational by the time V1 of the DSL Toolkit is available and so far I don’t see any reasons why this wouldn’t be possible.

I am now using the September CTP of the DSL Toolkit. Unfortunately the migration of the whole project took some more time than expected. I followed all steps of the (perfect) migration guide but still I got an error when trying to use the designer of my Language in the debug instance of Visual Studio.NET. It took me some time and a little help of the DSL Team to find out that my designer definition file contained some “shape definitions” that I wasn’t actually using anymore. These shapes were now part of a compartment shape in my language but I had forgotten to delete the definitions from the file. The May CTP build didn’t have any problems with this. The very cryptic error message (“package …. Has failed to load properly”) wasn’t very helpful for finding the problem. So solving this issue took some time. The good thing of course is to see that more and more validations are built in the Toolkit. I have good faith that the final release will provide more descriptive (helpful) error messages for these new validationsJ.

What are we working on now? Currently we are working on the “generating WSDL part”. This WSDL will be based on the service description that is modelled by using the DSL. For me this basically this comes down to writing some T4 templates to mix the “service description” (modelled in the language) with some pure C# code that Christian wrote to generate the WSDL. This work is almost done. From there we can do basically everything we want with code generation.

There isn’t much information available about writing T4 templates. Anybody interesting in writing these templates might find some help in this blog post of Gareth Jones (DSL Team) about the T4 syntax. A little information about how to navigate over your DSL model can be found here on the Domain Specific Language Tools forum.

Some directives that I needed within the templates:

To include files (create some sort of a function library):

<#@ include file="filename.extension" #>

To reference an assembly:

<#@ Assembly Name="System.Web.Services.dll" #>

To import a namespace:

<#@ import namespace="System.Web.Services.Description" #>

A lot more information about writing templates will be made available in the V1 release of the Toolkit. By then all the API that can be used for writing templates will be stable and no longer subject to change.

To be continued…