Service Oriented Modelling with DSL Tools
Posted by santoshbenjamin on October 9, 2008
I was sent a link to a mind blowing Channel 9 video on Service Oriented Modelling presented by Blair Shaw and Hatay Tuna. IMO, thats the most inspiring piece of kit i’ve seen so far. The work Hatay has put into it is fab. If you havent seen it , then do yourself a favor and take a look.
It demonstrates what can be done with the DSL tools and more importantly shows the kind of tooling that can be produced to support a proper SOA where services actually represent business capabilities rather than random little components dressed up with WSDL and pretty diagrams.
Key thing to remember though is that this is not a free tool. Its used by Microsoft Consulting Services as part of customer engagements. But even watching the video is highly educative on the steps to go from requirements and capabilities to service and technology models through to implementation and also highlights how it is possible to code-gen even WF activities to match the business process steps.
This is the kind of tool I dreamt of building in the past. (Yeah, i dream a lot 
. But seriously, while VS2005 had some of the basic foundations, we didnt have the depth of tooling to make something like this possible and now we do. Of course MCS had the EFx software factory and eventually the DSL Tools matured to the extent where the Service Factory modeling edition could be delivered on it but this kit goes way beyond all that. The platfom its implemented on is VS2008/.NET 3.5, so I can well imagine what it could become on the VS2010/NET 4 platform.
Its only 30 mins or so and the quality of the video is very high (although the download is a bit heavy due to the quality). Check it out. And while you’re there on Channel 9, take a look at the videos for VS 2010. There’s some really cool stuff there too.. Enjoy…
