It was very silent here in the past month. That was mainly because I was working on my diploma thesis until the end of September. After that I did my final exam and started working in Bonn. Now it is December and almost 2009. I’m sitting in a plane to Australia for holiday and have [...]

I created two DirectiveProcessor for Visual Studio to use in the T4 system. I added the classes to JaDAL hoping someone can use them in her project or use the code as an example when creating new DirectiveProcessors.
Let’s start with a short introduction to DirectiveProcessors. DirectiveProcessors are used in .tt-files to provide data to the [...]

Every DSL you create with DSL Tools has a model explorer. This model explorer is a tool window in Visual Studio displaying the elements of your model in a hierarchical way. This is often a nice feature but sometimes a hierarchical view of your data is not appropriate. So I came to the question: How [...]

There is a known issue in the current version of the DSL Tools while dealing with custom TypeConverters or custom TypeDescriptors:
1.10 TypeConverters and TypeDescriptors are not picked up during the build process or during toolbox initialization.
When adding a custom TypeConverter or TypeDescriptor and then building the DSL, the TypeConvertor or TypeDescriptor is not picked up. [...]

As you know I was working with the DSL Tools in the past months. Since a few weeks I has to write the code generation for my project and struggled with some new problems.
For some reason I want to know the filename of the model used in the tt-file. The default implementation provides you only [...]

One of my DSLs uses many black connectors laying all over the screen. Every time I try to follow one connector I select it to change the border and to see a difference between all connectors. A colleague saw this design and asks me to implement a mouse over feedback for these connectors since all [...]

In To restrict dynamically the usage of Domain Properties in DSL Models I described a way to restrict to usage of certain domain properties by the user. You can define different modes for your editor and allow or prevent the usage of domain properties via attributes on your domain classes. The technique is described in [...]

Over the time I build some libraries that enhance the Microsoft DSL Tools framework and post them here. I wrote a number of articles and for many of them I provided a download with source code or examples.
However we all know: zip files are a bad version management system!
I decided to put all these [...]

Few months ago I wrote a series of articles and released a library to create connectors between the entries of compartment shapes in Microsoft DSL Tools. In the meantime I found a setting that wasn’t working with my library and now it is time for version 2. I will release this new version as part [...]

When using CompartmentShapes in your DSL you can define the text displayed in the head of each compartment in the DSL designer (there is a property Title for every compartment):

Unfortunately I didn’t find any way to change this text from my source code or by binding it to some DomainProperty. I’m using an abstract base [...]

One would think, it is a simple feature in the DSL Tools framework to allow and forbid the deletion of model elements, but it isn’t.
There are a few posts in the DSL Forum and it seems there are even a few methods to forbid the deletion. But every single solution has its pros and cons [...]

What’s the matter?
If you define Domain Properties on your Domain Classes and Shapes, you can configure the way a user of your DSL can interact with this Domain Properties. With the properties Is Browsable and Is UI Read Only you can hide a property from the Properties Window, make it read only or give the [...]

As you all know I’m working with Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) at the moment. VSX is a interesting field to work with but it is badly documented. There are some samples, some books, communities and so on and if you search the web for a while you can find answers to most of the basic [...]

[Update (2008-05-21): This code is now hosted at CodePlex as part of JaDAL. And a follow-up article was published.]
Previously on…
This article is part of a series. A table of contents can be found at the end of the first article. Part 2 contains a user guide and in part 3 I showed most of the [...]

[Update (2008-05-21): This code is now hosted at CodePlex as part of JaDAL. And a follow-up article was published.]
Previously on…
This article is part of a series. The table of contents can be found at the end of the first article. In that article you can also find a brief overview. In the second part there [...]

[Update (2008-05-21): This code is now hosted at CodePlex as part of JaDAL. And a follow-up article was published.]
Previously on…
This article is part of a series. A table of contents can be found at the end of the first article. In that article you can also find a brief overview.

User guide
If you read this article [...]

[Update (2008-05-21): This code is now hosted at CodePlex as part of JaDAL. And a follow-up article was published.]
This is the first part of an article series to this topic on a library I wrote. At the end of this article you find links to the upcoming articles. The download can be found at part [...]

Each element you can see in a DSL Diagram within the DSL editor is based on a Domain Class defined in your DSL Definition. If the user selects on of these shapes in the Editor he can change the values of the defined Domain Properties in the well known Properties Window of Visual Studio, but [...]