Introduction to Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools
- Nov 16, 2007
This chapter is from the book
Introduction
This book describes the Microsoft Domain-Specific Language Tools (the DSL Tools). The DSL Tools are part of the Visual Studio SDK, and may be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/DSLTools/. The DSL Tools extend Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to support a powerful way of developing software called Domain-Specific Development.
Domain-Specific Development is based on the observation that many software development problems can more easily be solved by designing a special-purpose language. As a small example, think about the problem of finding every occurrence of a particular pattern of characters in a file, and doing something with each occurrence that you find. The special-purpose textual language of regular expressions is specifically designed to do this job. For example, using the .NET class System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex, the regular expression (?<user>[^@]+)@(?<host>.+) applied to a string of characters will find email addresses in it, and for each address found, assign the substring immediately before the @ sign to the user variable, and the substring immediately after the @ sign to the host variable. Without the regular expression language, a developer would have to write a special program to recognize the patterns and assign the correct values to the appropriate variables. This is a significantly more error-prone and heavyweight task.
Domain-Specific Development applies this same approach to a wide variety of problems, especially those that involve managing the complexity of modern distributed systems such as those that can be developed on the .NET platform. Instead of just using general-purpose programming languages to solve these problems one at a time, the practitioner of Domain-Specific Development creates and implements special languages, each of which efficiently solves a whole class of similar problems.
Domain-Specific Languages can be textual or graphical. Graphical languages have significant advantages over textual languages for many problems, because they allow the solution to be visualized very directly as diagrams. The DSL Tools make it easy to implement graphical DSLs, and they enable Domain-Specific Development to be applied to a wide range of problems.
