Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools (Paperback)

~ Steve Cook (Author), Gareth Jones (Author), Stuart Kent (Author), Alan Cameron Wills (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)--languages geared to specific vertical or horizontal areas of interest--are generating growing excitement from software engineers and architects. DSLs bring new agility to the creation and evolution of software, allowing selected design aspects to be expressed in terms much closer to the system requirements than standard program code, significantly reducing development costs in large-scale projects and product lines. In this breakthrough book, four leading experts reveal exactly how DSLs work, and how you can make the most of them in your environment.

With Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools, you'll begin by mastering DSL concepts and techniques that apply to all platforms. Next, you'll discover how to create and use DSLs with the powerful new Microsoft DSL Tools--a toolset designed by this book's authors. Learn how the DSL Tools integrate into Visual Studio--and how to define DSLs and generate Visual Designers using Visual Studio's built-in modeling technology.

In-depth coverage includes

• Determining whether DSLs will work for you
• Comparing DSLs with other approaches to model-driven development
• Defining, tuning, and evolving DSLs: models, presentation, creation, updates, serialization, constraints, validation, and more
• Creating Visual Designers for new DSLs with little or no coding
• Multiplying productivity by generating application code from your models with easy-to-use text templates
• Automatically generating configuration files, resources, and other artifacts
• Deploying Visual Designers across the organization, quickly and easily
• Customizing Visual Designers for specialized process needs

List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword
Preface
About the Authors
Chapter 1 Domain-Specific Development
Chapter 2 Creating and Using DSLs
Chapter 3 Domain Model Definition
Chapter 4 Presentation
Chapter 5 Creation, Deletion, and Update Behavior
Chapter 6 Serialization
Chapter 7 Constraints and Validation
Chapter 8 Generating Artifacts
Chapter 9 Deploying a DSL
Chapter 10 Advanced DSL Customization
Chapter 11 Designing a DSL
Index 

About the Author

Steve Cook joined Microsoft in 2003 to work on the DSL Tools. Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, which he represented in the UML 2.0 specification process at the OMG. He has worked in the IT industry for 30 years, as architect, programmer, author, consultant, and teacher. He was one of the first people to introduce object-oriented programming into the UK, and has concentrated on languages, methods, and tools for modeling since the early 1990s.

Gareth Jones is a lead developer in the DSL Tools team. He's been at Microsoft since 1997 doing various developer jobs such as building bespoke enterprise solutions, running the development of Microsoft UK's small business portal, and managing a consultancy team. Before joining Microsoft, he spent seven years leading development projects in the intelligence analysis, simulation, and aerospace industries.

Stuart Kent joined Microsoft in 2003 to work on the DSL Tools. Previously, he was an academic and consultant, with a reputation in modeling and model-driven development. He has over 50 publications to his name and made significant contributions to the UML 2.0 and MOF 2.0 specifications. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Software and Systems Modeling, and on the steering committee for the MoDELS series of conferences. He has a Ph.D. in computing from Imperial College, London.

Alan Cameron Wills was a methodology consultant for almost a decade, and used to get very frustrated when people asked about good tools to support the methods. So he was very pleased to join Microsoft in 2003 to help in the DSL Tools project. He has a Ph.D. in computer science, and was joint creator of the Catalysis approach to component-based development. He gets excited about software factories, photography, sailing, and hills.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (June 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321398203
• ISBN-13: 978-0321398208
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #582,219 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Microsoft .NET Development Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for my taste of technical book , August 23, 2007

By	Bruno Capuano "El Bruno" (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The books covers almost all of the capabilities for the DSL world, however in this approach to cover all themes, they present some important subjects in a very light way. The reader must have a previous and seriuos knowledge of DSL items and a lot of experience in Visual Studio 2005.
However some chapters (2,3,4,8 and 9) are very very good :D

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Frustrating, May 17, 2009

By	Kenneth Welling - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was compelled to write this review a few minutes ago while attempting to use this book. I rarely bother to write a bad review-- but I'm fired up.

It's really a fairly horrible example of the genre. The problem is that there is no other game in town for this material.

It's clear the authors know what they are about. In fact, it's fairly obvious they are all brilliant professionals, but they desperately need good editors and co-authors who specialize in presenting this type of material.

This technology is relatively new and unfortunately it seems as though the example implementations available on-line are written by the authors of this book. Terrible or absent in-code documentation is the rule. ...So I am forced to read the book to sort out HOW to do the simplest of things.

When this happens, I seem to spend 15 minutes trying to find precisely what portion of the book is applicable. It's not that the book is poorly organized on a high level. It's that actual content isn't presented in an manner that lends itself to reference.

The examples presented are almost all part of large extended examples that run through most of the book. So I inevitably feel that I am missing most of the context when I start to read. Then the information is sometimes presented in language that sounds insular and academic to me -- a developer and software architect for over 15 years.

The authors seem to have expected the readers to set aside a day or two of their life to read the book from cover to cover and somehow remember it all. It's an absurd premise for a developer's book. No developer worth their salt has that kind of time ... unless they are an academic. It's also an impossible premise because the material is dry as a bone. After reading books from the "Head First" authors, this material will make you want to claw your eyes out.

I think the worst difficulty is that I find key information on how to integrate pieces of the functionality is often ignored or thrown in as an afterthought.

As an example, I discovered I need to add validation on some data entered into my DSL. It seems like an easy thing to do, right? Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to figure that out, right? 15 pages into the section on "Constraints and Validation" I find I understand perfectly why the authors have decided to implement this functionality using C# instead of Object Constraint Language. I understand a great deal about their architectural decisions. I can recite the topology of their belly-buttons on the day they sat down to write the functionality, but I have no idea how to hook up a !@#$ing constraint.

I had the opportunity to listen to a web presentation by one of the authors, Gareth Jones. He presented some ingeniously written code for an example implementation of the DSL tools. To my complete and utter lack of surprise, I understood almost nothing nothing that he said. I found myself zipping back and forth in the presentation trying to deduct how pieces of the code examples he gave were meant to go together.
I was grateful to find the code itself was available on-line ... with no in-line documentation of course. I spent hours understanding how it all fit together when, with some basic presentation skills, he could have given me the information in 5 minutes.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What not how, March 25, 2008

By	R. B. Van Slingerlandt "Rainier" (Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am disappointed, because the writers are the top of Microsofts engine driving domain specific languages.
The book tells what is possible using Visual Studio 2005 and the DSL tools. However it does a terrible job in explaining how and when to use the tools.
It is not a handsone book, you can't take it and work through examples and it is not an reading/theoratical book either, you can't read it while one the train to work and hope to learn anything.
Just like the book on software factories this book is elaborate and the writers are smart they are just not capable of making the information simple and interesting enough to stick into my head.