Apparently I wasn’t the only one with questions about the relationship between OLSO and the DSL Tools. Both Stuart Kent (DSL Tools) and Keith Short (OSLO) respond to these questions from their point of view. Although both offerings are based on a different technology stack, they both have a lifecycle in front of them, the responsible teams aligned their vision and differences will be bridged over future releases. That’s what I call good news!

Those of you interested in software factories should check out the new Blueprints Manger and Sample Blueprint which were released on the Blueprints Codeplex site right after PDC 2008. Jack Greenfield and Michael Lehman hosted the ‘Blueprint booth’ at PDC 2008 where they demoed this latest release. Blueprints represent the next generation Software Factories and solve many of the authoring and deploying issues that we have experienced with GAT/GAX based software factories. In addition, they add some great features (some of them demonstrated in the Sample Blueprint) to the factory space like :

• Multiple interacting Blueprints
• Blueprint Composition
• RSS based updates
• WF-Process structured workflow
• WF-Commands - workflows which can automation developer tasks within Visual Studio
• Custom Menu Filters - allowing menus to appear when the conditions are right
• Code generation using the T4 Template system
• Custom extensions - assemblies which can interact with the user and Visual Studio

Details on Blueprints can be found in the ‘Introduction to Microsoft Blueprints’ paper (link currently broken but will be fixed soon!) that can be downloaded from the Blueprints homepage on MSDN.

More information, samples, screencasts on factory authoring, planning, etc. will be available in the coming period so you better make sure to get back to the Blueprints home on Codeplex reguarly! (expect some info on this blog too ;))

Last week at PDC 2008, OSLO was announced as the new platform for model driven development. OSLO is composed of a language called ‘M’, a tool called ‘Quadrant’ and a repository. After the announcement of OSLO I spoke to several people asking me my opinion about the difference and/or overlap between OSLO and the Microsoft DSL Tools, which is the current toolset for building visual DSL’s. Obviously, at that moment wasn’t very clear for a lot of people including me. After some more discussing and thinking I have things more clear:

In the session of Douglas Purdy and Vijaye Raji, called ‘A lap about OSLO’, Douglas mentioned three types of modeling (models). First, we have ‘drawings’ which are primarily used to communicate with others. Perfect tools for creating drawings are whiteboard or tools like Visio. Second, we have ‘Model Assisted’ models which are used to understand or manipulate code (or other artifacts). Last, we have ‘model driven’ where models are directly executed by a runtime and drive runtime behavior of applications.

Obviously, OSLO is all about ‘Model Driven’ and driving runtime behavior. When looking at the new Team Architect (UML) diagrams in VS 2010 CTP we can see that DSL Tools fit perfectly in the ‘Model Assisted’ world. All new diagrams in Team Architect are build on the DSL Tools and especially in combination with (future) technology, often referred to as ‘designer bus’, DSL Tools are very powerful in scenarios where artifact generation is involved.

So, currently each platform supports a different approach. Possibly there are some overlaps and only Microsoft can tell how both platforms evolve, coexists and/or eventually (partially) integrate?

In the meantime, I will start experimenting with OSLO and definitely continue to work with the DSL Tools to get the best of both worlds!