Jelle Druyts

Tom's team has been kind enough to put my session of last year's TechDays (then still known as the Developer & IT Pro Days) online on MSDN Chopsticks. You can find my "Deep Dive Into The Guidance Automation Toolkit" presentation at http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=10. Everything I said back then is still relevant today, so if you missed it last year you can now catch up for free

And in the light of Software Factory technologies, it also makes a nice preparation for my talk on Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools next week. My session is scheduled on Thursday March 13 at 10:45. I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope to see you there!

The annual Belgian tech-fest for Microsoft developers, architects and IT pro's is coming to Ghent again soon, and I'm once again proud to host a session in the Developers track for TechDays!

Domain Specific Development with Visual Studio Domain Specific Language (DSL) Tools

As one of the pillars of the Software Factories initiative, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) provide a way to describe your business domain in a language closer to the actual problem than using traditional programming code.

The Visual Studio Domain Specific Language Tools allow developers to create their own graphical designers and code generation tools – much like the ones you can find in Visual Studio today, such as the Class Designer.

In this session, you will learn how to develop your own DSLs inside Visual Studio and see an example of a real-world DSL that simplifies your life as a developer: the Configuration Section Designer.

Heroes are Assembled { in Software Factories }

Hope to see you there!

I just released my first domain specific language to the public! The Configuration Section Designer is a Visual Studio add-in that allows you to graphically design .NET Configuration Sections and automatically generates all the required code and a schema definition (XSD) for them.

For all information, downloads, source code, work item tracking and discussions visit http://www.codeplex.com/csd.

The Configuration Section Designer is built on Visual Studio 2008 with the very excellent DSL Tools. Instead of publishing it here on the blog as I normally do with my pet projects, I've decided to host it as open source software on CodePlex so that hopefully other people will find it interesting enough to contribute and make it even more powerful. This also gives me the chance to test-drive CodePlex in a real project, and so far it's been working great so I'll probably be moving more projects to it.

Anyway, if you have Configuration Sections that you're currently writing by hand, I encourage you to try this and let me know how it works for you. I'm pretty excited about it, I've only published it yesterday evening and it's already got over 40 downloads and a good feature suggestion of someone that's been porting his hand-written code to the designer! Good times!