It’s been a long time since I wrote about the never ending story of the small demo Domain Specific Language we are building. In the meantime I received a few mails asking me for the status and Steven Kelly even mentions in this post that I probably gave up on the DSL Tools.

Well…, as we wrote in our recently published article (still only available for subscribers) we have plans to make it downloadable as soon as the V1 of the Microsoft DSL Tools hits the streets. To prepare a little for that I decided it was about time to install the latest June CTP of the DSL Tools and try if I was able to get this DSL working in the new DSL Tools.

I used the migration tool that comes with the June CTP to migrate my old domain model and designer definitions into the completely new format. Although this migration went quite smooth, I decided to start from scratch again, just to get familiar with this new release of the DSL Tools.

To be honest, that took some time. I considered myself an “experienced” DSL Tools user so decided it wasn’t necessary to read the (limited) documentation. I was wrong! Because of that I noticed far too late that there is a “DSL Details” window that helps you set some (important) properties for the domain model and designer. This was one of the reasons I didn’t get things working. Once I found the DSL Details window (View/Other Windows from the menu) things became much easier.

Another issue that took some time was that during debugging my DSL the shapes didn’t appear after dropping them on the design surface. They were added to the underlying model and did appear in the “Explorer” window. After some time I found out that I had to add my domain classes as “Element Merge Directives” of the root (in my DSL “Service”).

The good thing about the new DSL Tools is that you (almost) don’t need to manually edit the underlying XML anymore. I only needed that to make my compartment shapes work. Once you understand the concepts, the “DSL Explorer” makes it relatively easy to build a domain model and designer and it looks *nice*!

As far as I am concerned, the new June CTP is a very nice upgrade of the DSL Tools.

Now I only have to migrate all my custom code (if still needed), add some validations and include the WSDL generation code and I am done J.

Hopefully there will be no breaking changes for V1!