Having spent some time in the VS2005 environment, I can say the following about DSLs:

 

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a language designed to be useful for a specific task in a fixed problem domain, in contrast to a general-purpose language. DSLs are gaining popularity in the field of software engineering to enhance productivity, maintainability, and reusability of software artifacts, and enable expression and validation of concepts at the level of abstraction of the problem domain.

 

Using domain-specific languages, one can build customized modeling tools and essentially define a new modeling language and implement it very simply. For example, a specialized language may be used to describe a user interface, a business process, a database, or the flow of information, and then used to generate code from those descriptions.

 

I built a (small) DSL for modeling application integration scenarios, which is always an issue in the IT business world. First, I defined all of the specific domain model terms used in application integrations scenarios such as XML messages, source destination applications, XSL maps, business units, protocols, business rules, etc. Then I described the designer definitions that make up the visualization tool. Once the meta data was defined in a supplied Visual Studio template, you build the solution and another instance of Visual Studio fires up with your visual designer implemented.

 

You then use the visual designer you just created to draw/model the application integration scenario and when you run this solution, it code generates the solution.

 

Of course, I have left out a lot of detail and it was not easy the first c