Microsoft excited about modeling
Microsoft seem to be quite excited about modeling these days. Just recently, they announced that they have joined the OMG. OMG does NOT stand for Old Modeling Guys, but for Object Management Group. This is the standards body that brought you specifications like CORBA, UML, MDA and BPMN, to name just a few.
But Microsoft does not just talk about modeling, they also put their money where their mouth is: during the last few years, a number of people including Steve Cook and Stuart Kent have been working on a toolchain which first has seen the light of day under the somewhat cryptic name VSX DSL Tools.
VSXDSL Tools are really good at rapidly creating (simple) graphical modeling tools. However, when it came to model transformations and code generation, you were stuck with a somewhat dated technology called T4 (Text Templating Transformation Toolkit) - a template language quite similar to JSP and ASP. T4 seriously lacks some important features, like polymorphic dispatch, support for multiple file output and - believe it or not - a decent editor. Well, you can get one from http://www.t4editor.net/, but who likes to shell out 99 dollars for just an editor?
Now, Microsoft seem to have listened to their users and are coming up with an updated and extended version of the DSL Tools, code-named Oslo.
So what is Oslo? Douglas Purdy states that Oslo is:
- A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner
- A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models
- A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components Looks to me like they are addressing all the issues MS DSL tools had.
At PDC 2008, the team will reveal Oslo and all its nice features.
Although I am an Eclipse fan and an openArchitectureWare committer, I am quite thrilled so see Microsoft make this move to embrace modeling. In my opinion, this will advance MDSD and DSLs quite a deal. A lot of people who may have never heard of DSLs and MDSD will now get in touch with those techniques due to the sheer marketing power of Microsoft. This will also bring some nice competition to the market, which always is a Good Thing (tm).
The press release states that "to make model-driven development a reality, Microsoft is focused on providing a model-driven platform and visual modeling tools [...]" - So, welcome to the modeling world, Microsoft!
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Don’t remind me about CORBA
I’m hopeful that Microsoft taking modeling seriously will make North Americans stop and notice something the Europeans have been noticing for a while. Given the head start we have at Eclipse, I can imagine that folks will end up looking closely at all the available alternatives, not just the latest Microsoft ones…
I searched for a several hours in the Internet and summarized my ideas about what I found…
You need to do some catchup about T4… what are you comparing it against to say it’s lacking ‘multiple file output support’ for instance? If you’re comparing it to one of the available codegen tools out there then that comparison is not really much useful as T4 doesn’t include pretty much any tooling at all and MS didn’t want to include it there because you can EASILY add support for what you’re asking (you would need to understand how T4 works of course, this won’t happen automagically) and have multiple output files from a single template. If you bother to google a bit you will also find open source projects that have already implemented this support.
I’ve been using T4 for some time now, I do understand how it works, I’ve written a custom host for it to fit my particular needs and I’m very happy with it. I’m also using the T4 Editor because I actually charge for my work so I can easily “recover” that money in one hour.
In deed there are some great Editors our there. One is T4 Editor by tanigble engineering which has lot of features in the FREE EDITION.
T4 Editor plus UML-Style Modelling Tools VS 2008