Skip to main content

Domain Specific Languages - A Slice Of The Future

The DSL (Domain Specific Language) toolkit shipped with Visual Studio SDK opened up a hand full of new possibilities for enterprises focusing on the Microsoft platforms. This enables organizations to harness the power of Domain Specific Modeling, to solve specific problems.

Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) involves systematic use of a graphical Domain-specific language (DSL) to represent the various facets of a system. Later, artifacts can be generated from the model, using domain aware generators.

The DSL approach has various advantages. Here are few - mainly from an Architect’s point of view.

Improves Standardization and maintainability

Using Domain Aware Generators to generate artifacts (like source code and functionality documents) from the Domain Model modeled using DSL brings high standardization and maintainability for the entire code base. This saves the enterprise from problems like code decay and logic scattering.

Enables Collaboration of Teams

Domain Specific Language modeling complements the efforts of the enterprise to unify various operations - independent of languages and technologies. For example, the Business Analysis team may use DSL to model the prototypes and flows – Development team may add validation constraints, definitions, and platform specific details to this model. And testing team can use the same model to define test cases.

Provides a Standardized, Integrated Work bench

The DSL approach for Domain Specific Modeling will enable the organization to provide visual designers and related tools to cater the needs of various teams - including business analysts, developers, and testers - to automate common tasks through the Visual Studio IDE, by taking all the advantages of the Visual Studio Team System.

Business Model Is Centralized

In traditional approach, the captured domain logic is documented and implemented in a very inconsistent manner, and is often available only in the form of source code. The DSL approach enables the organization to rapidly generate, configure, assemble and deploy solutions based on a centralized business model. This results in reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) without compensating on scaling up the productivity and innovation. This also provides an excellent way to preserve and reuse domain knowledge.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please keep your comments clean.

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a quick Todo listing app on Windows using IIS7, Node.js and Mongodb

As I mentioned in my last post, more and more organizations are leaning towards Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) which are highly scalable. If you were exploring cool, scalable options to build highly performing web applications, you know what Node.js is for.After following the recent post from Scott Hanselman, I was up and running quickly with Node.js. In this post, I’ll explain step by step how I’ve setup Node.js and Mongodb to create a simple Todo listing application.Setting up Node.jsThis is what I’ve done.1 – Goto http://nodejs.org/, scroll down and download node.exe for Windows, and place it in your c:\node folder2 – Goto IIS Node project in Git at https://github.com/tjanczuk/iisnode, download the correct ‘retail’ link of IIS Node zip file (I downloaded the already built retail package, otherwise you can download and build from the source).3 – Extract the zip file some where, and run the install.bat or install_iisexpress.bat depending on your IIS Version. If you don’t have IIS in…
Read more

Top 7 Coding Standards & Guideline Documents For C#/.NET Developers

Some time back, I collated a list of 7 Must Read, Free EBooks for .NET Developers, and a lot of people found it useful. So, I thought about putting together a list of Coding Standard guidelines/checklists for .NET /C# developers as well.As you may already know, it is easy to come up with a document - the key is in implementing these standards in your organization, through methods like internal trainings, Peer Reviews, Check in policies, Automated code review tools etc. You can have a look at FxCop and/or StyleCop for automating the review process to some extent, and can customize the rules based on your requirements.Anyway, here is a list of some good Coding Standard Documents. They are useful not just from a review perspective - going through these documents can definitely help you and me to iron out few hidden glitches we might have in the programming portion of our brain. So, here we go, the listing is not in any specific order.1 – IDesign C# Coding StandardsIDesign C# coding stand…
Read more

MVVM - Binding Multiple Radio Buttons To a single Enum Property in WPF

I had a property in my View Model, of an Enum type, and wanted to bind multiple radio buttons to this.

Firstly, I wrote a simple Enum to Bool converter, like this.

public class EnumToBoolConverter : IValueConverter { #region IValueConverter Members public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { if (parameter.Equals(value)) return true; else return false; } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { return parameter; } #endregion }

And my enumeration is like

public enum CompanyTypes { Type1Comp, Type2Comp, Type3Comp } Now, in my XAML, I provided the enumeration as the ConverterParameter, of the Converter we wrote earlier, like
<Wi…
1 comment
Read more