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Oslo and the DSL Toolkit

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I’ve received a number of questions concerning the relationship of Oslo to the Visual Studio DSL Toolkit. Comments have varied from the sublime (see David Ing’s comment on his blog “My best guess is that the DSL Toolkit is research road kill in front of the big Oslo truck and that VSTS Architecture Edition was just about a necessary cycle too early” ) to the ridiculous. Since I’ve been a founder member of both projects, I thought I’d try to start the discussion with a few comments of my own.

Firstly, it’s true that the two efforts are built on different technology stacks – the DSL Toolkit works on file-based artifacts (schemas, model instances, etc.) and produces graphical and forms-based tools that run as add-ins to Visual Studio – dramatically simplifying the task of creating tools hosted via VS extensibility.

On the other hand, Oslo is based on an underlying SQL database. Quadrant depends on the underlying database for both the data it is processing and its own configuration data. In other words, Quadrant’s equivalent of the DSL Tools’ domain modeling language and the shape and shape mapping languages is MSchema. Concrete textual languages are of course defined in MGrammar.

Despite these differences, two things need to be made really clear:

1. Both the Oslo and the DSL Toolkit have grown from a common belief in the role DSLs can play in the development lifecycle. Not just during development, but DSLs that help record Business Objectives, Business Processes and Entities, System Architectures, Software components and connections, Deployment Information, Data Center Configuration, and System Management to name just some of the lifecycle stages. This is a shared vision, well documented elsewhere, though each project has focused on a different aspect initially. The DSL Toolkit builds great graphical (box and line) tools that run in Visual Studio and may be translated into code-based artifacts. Oslo is focused on textual and graphical developer experiences around models that initially represent code and configuration that “completes” the underlying frameworks that are part of the application platform – in other words – models that are mostly executable by the underlying servers and frameworks (e.g. WF, WCF, and Identity Services).

 

2. Both products have a lifecycle in front of them. The two teams, already aligned around vision, are working together to bridge differences over releases. Would it have been nice to have gone dark for a period while we resolved these technology stack issues and re-emerged with a fully aligned set of technologies? You bet – but such a strategy rarely ends with the right thing being built for customers. Ideas we are tossing around include (a) storing DSL Toolkit artifacts (including those created with the emerging UML tools from VSTA) in the Oslo Repository, (b) using MSchema as the domain language for the DSL Toolkit, and (c) converging on a single way to specify concrete DSL syntax whether it is graphical or textual. Sadly, I can’t give dates at this point.

Stuart Kent is the architect for DSL Tools. If you take a look at Stuart’s blog, you’ll find the latest blog entry where he responds to the same questions from his point of view.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/index.php/2008/11/07/oslo-and-the-dsl-toolkit/

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    The Oslo modeling platform was announced at Microsoft's PDC and we've been asked by a number of customers

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    Ok, it seems that the two are not that separate after all, at least from a future direction point of...

  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2008
    DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010

  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2008
    As we talk about textual and visual Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) in the context of Oslo, you may

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2008
    So after all the excitement of the PDC, now TechEd Europe is upon us and we're finally talking in some

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2008
    Hi, Some questions about these points : My first impression is that DSL tools are less tied with an objective than Oslo. I already saw a work where one person created a tool to model game scenarios with DSL Tools. Is this first impression right or wrong ? Second, one more specific point is the modeling graphics created with VS 2010. We have use cases, sequential diagrams, class designer, but Oslo, may be 5 months later VS 2010 being shipped, will have all these diagrams too. How these two technologies will work together in this case ? Thank you ! []'s Dennes

  • Anonymous
    November 18, 2008
    Doug has published a response to an Open Letter addressed to him from Lars Corneliussen . I think Doug

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2008
    Keith Short has been blogging about Oslo and the DSL Toolkit and Oslo's use of model-driven terminology.

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2009
    The comment has been removed