DSI, SDM, and DSL Revisited

DSI, SDM, and DSL Revisited

Going back to what I mentioned in Chapter 3, the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and the System Definition Model (SDM) are important initiatives that will enable the development of your product, as well as Microsoft products, to be dramatically simplified and more automated. This is especially true in regard to deployment and ongoing operations and maintenance.

Visual Studio 2005 provides an extensible modeling platform on which Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) can be implemented. Since DSLs are visual languages used to define requirements and generate parts of a solution, they are a natural fit inside of Visual Studio. ISVs can create custom designers on this platform as well, integrating their DSL tools into Visual Studio 2005. This modeling platform includes support for UI integration, extensible drawing surface (such as routing and auto-layout), artifact generation, constraint checking, user guides to resolve issues, and in-memory graphing.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Architects is the first suite of designers based on this modeling platform. It will include the Distributed System Designers and the Class Designer.