I have just updated my blog to DasBlog 1.8. If something doesn't work anymore please let me know!

Finally! A little more information is available of the DSL Tools modelling API! In this post George Mathew provide us with (some) details on the improvements the DSL Tools team made in the modelling API.

As you might have noticed from my previous posts, we have a quite a lot of custom code in our Domain Specific Language that uses this modelling API. Therefore changes in the modelling API will reflect in some additional work for us also. Hopefully not to much!

According to George, creating new Domain Classes can now be done by using the ‘new’ keyword. Isn’t that great? (and obvious J). The good new is that also the “old” mechanism is supported in the new API. Hmmm, I think I will definitely upgrade my code to use the ‘new’.

Great work, waiting for more news George!

It’s been a long time since my last post. I have been busy lately working on a few pretty cool things. Unfortunately cannot talk about most of the things yet. But, there’s one thing I can talk about and that is the “ever lasting story” of our Domain Specific Language for designing service contracts.

We still plan to make it available for download as soon as the RTM of the DSL Tools is available. In the meantime we are adding some nice features that hopefully improve the usability of the Domain Specific Language. Of course, we have to make some (hopefully not to many) changes to make our custom code work against the changes API of the RTM of the DSL Tools.

For now, let me show you some images of some of the features and/or improvements we have been working on. Just to show you this language isn’t dead yet!

First of all, as you can see in the image below, we included some nice images in the ToolBox. Not that difficult but I like the Toolbox a little better now.

Further we added some custom menus. One of them to fire the “WSDL generation” another one to fire the “generating model out of WSDL file” option.

Below you can see an example of two custom menus that are available when right clicking a MessageShape in our model. When pressing the “Select Message XSD location” (description will probably change!) you get a FileDialog box to select an XSD file that describes the Message. After you selected the XSD, the “schemalocation” property of the MessageShape in the model gets populated with the reference to the XSD.

A next thing you can do is right click the MessageShape again and this time you can select the “Select Message from XSD” option. As you can see in the image below, this action results in a new window that pops up and that is populated with all the message definitions in the XSD that you selected in the previous action. You can also click on the messages to see the DataContracts that are referenced in the message.

After selecting a message the MessageShape in the model gets populated with the name of the selected message and the DataContracts belonging to the message are also added to the MessageShape. Maybe no rocket science, but it hopefully makes the Language a little easier to use.

To be continued...