Community developer blogs

Gareth Jones

Recent Posts

• DSL 2010 Feature Dives: T4 Preprocessing - Part Two - Basic Design

  Posted: 12 Nov 2008 at 00:38

  Lat time we looked at the "WHy" of T4 preprocessing - now let's look at an overview of the how. To explain the new features, it's helpful to have a look at the current way data flows through T4 2008. Let's suppose you have a trivial template generating some trivial output: Now to get from the te

• DSL 2010 Feature Dives: T4 Preprocessing - Part One - Rationale

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 22:03

  Strictly, this isn't a DSL 2010 feature, but a general Visual Studio 2010 feature; T4 is only coupled organizationally to DSL Tools, not technically, but it fits into our current announcements, so I won't worry about that too much. Over the last year or so, I've been fielding an increasing number of

• Nice step-by-step on adding a menu to DSL Tools 2008

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 21:12

  Sebastian Talamoni has a nice guide to adding a menu using a vsct file. Technorati Tags: DSL Tools, VSX

• New DSL Tools lab

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 20:51

  Jean-Marc has just released a complete walkthrough of DSL Tools for Visual Studio 2008 aimed at DSL beginners as a lab on CodeGallery. Here you can see the language from the lab designing mouse gestures for manipulating primitives in a simple graphics program. Very nice indeed. Technorati Tags: DSL

• Belated Welcome - Eyal Lantzman

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 20:10

  Very poor show of me - I forgot to welcome Eyal Lantzman to the team. Eyal recently joined the team in Cambridge, (I originally wrote "us" instead of "the team" there - note to self - must remember that I live in America now!). As part of this, he's made the big life change

• DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010 - the cat is well and truly out of the bag

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 20:00

  So after all the excitement of the PDC, now TechEd Europe is upon us and we're finally talking in some more depth about where we're going in Visual Studio 2010 with DSL Tools. Firstly, quite a few of you have been pinging me to ask about the relationship between DSL Tools and Oslo. See Keith and St

• Using extension methods in T4 templates

  Posted: 29 Oct 2008 at 23:54

  Adam has a groovy post on T4, but he's under the impression that you can't use C# extension methods in T4. I just wanted to discuss the limitations that exist and show how you can take advantage of this cool C#/VB 3.5 feature.Extension methods require you to declare a top-level static class, and don

• Another collection of T4 resources

  Posted: 23 Oct 2008 at 17:41

  Hot on the heels of all the interest Scott's post has generated in T4, Jon Stonecash has a useful consolidation of T4 links.Technorati Tags: T4

• New DSL Screencasts avaialble from VSX Conference

  Posted: 21 Oct 2008 at 19:15

  Just a quick note that there are a couple of DSL/T4 specific sessions among the plethora of great VSX content just posted by Anthony.Jean-Marc's DSL 101 SessionDomain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL ToolsDomain-Specific Language Models are a powerful technique for embodying in a tool the

• informIT video interview on DSL Tools with Ted Neward and Gareth Jones

  Posted: 15 Oct 2008 at 02:58

  These videos have been around for quite a while now, but I suddenly realised that I didn't have any links to them on the blog.It's an hour or so of Ted and I chewing the fat on the why's and wherefores of Domain-Specific Development. If this is your bag and you can put up with my shiny blue

• Hanselman gives T4 some love.

  Posted: 14 Oct 2008 at 21:00

  Aaron just pointed out to me that Scott Hanselman has been lavishing love on T4, Oleg's techniques library and the Clarius T4 Editor. Nice one Scott.Scott also notes that Rob is using it to create a nice repository over a DB for his SubSonic project.And of course, its always worth another namecheck

• Does anyone use T4's support for calling the VS service from unmanaged code?

  Posted: 24 Sep 2008 at 23:39 by GarethJ

  We're considering dropping this support in the next version of Visual Studio and restricting T4 to being called as a managed API.  If this presents problems for you because you have a dependency on the COM interface, please shout now. Technorati Tags: T4,VSX,DSL Tools

• Does anyone use T4's support for calling the VS service from unmanaged code?

  Posted: 24 Sep 2008 at 22:39

  We're considering dropping this support in the next version of Visual Studio and restricting T4 to being called as a managed API. If this presents problems for you because you have a dependency on the COM interface, please shout now.Technorati Tags: T4,VSX,DSL Tools

• Clarius' T4 Editor ships V1.0

  Posted: 16 Sep 2008 at 00:32 by GarethJ

  Victor pinged me to say that Clarius had launched their eagerly-awaited T4 editor for Visual Studio. That's pretty exciting news for all those of use who edit T4 templates on a daily basis - that's almost everyone these days, right? ;-)   Technorati Tags: T4,VSX,Clarius,T4Editor

• Gnomz Software's Viewpoints for Visual Studio

  Posted: 16 Sep 2008 at 00:23 by GarethJ

  Graham from Gnomz Software pinged to mention his company's DSL-based viewpoint business modeling system. Check it out: Technorati Tags: DSL Tools,VSX,Visual Studio Extensibility

• Come to the VSX DevCon

  Posted: 30 Jul 2008 at 04:07 by GarethJ

  James has just posted a few of the session abstracts for our spiffy VSX Developer Conference to be held in Redmond, WA this September.   Much VSX and DSL goodness and a chance to bug the team about what you want us to be creating next. Take a look and get yourself registered. Technorati Ta

• DSL Book samples updated for Visual Studio 2008

  Posted: 23 Jul 2008 at 00:25 by GarethJ

  It's taken us a little while, but the code samples for our book, Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools, are now updated for Visual Studio 2008. You can download them from www.domainspecificdevelopment.com. Woo Hoo. Enjoy.         Technorati Tags: DSL Tools,Code

• We shipped the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta!

  Posted: 20 May 2008 at 04:41 by GarethJ

  Quan just announced that today we shipped another release of the Visual Studio 2008 SDK. See more detail including the readme over on his blog.   Incidentally, you can meet Quan and also Mariano and Gearard from our team at TechEd Developers 2008 down in sunny Florida.   Technorati Tags: V

• Where have all the testers gone?

  Posted: 20 May 2008 at 02:51 by GarethJ

  (With apologies to Paula Cole) We've had jobs posted for testers for DSL Tools and the other cool Visual Studio eXtensibility things we're doing here in Redmond on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team for a while now and to my amazement, they're still open. We're looking for a lead and a couple of indiv

• Couple more VSX bloggers

  Posted: 20 May 2008 at 02:31 by GarethJ

  And here's a couple more folks with VSX/DSL related blog series that I missed from my previous post: Long-time DSL-er (and recent MSFT hire) Andre Furtado has a series of DSL posts indexed under DSL Tools: how to resources Sebastian Talamoni has a bunch of DSL posts including some funky property gri