Download Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK Beta 1

Following the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and that of the Visual Studio 2010 Software Development Kit Beta 1, Microsoft has also releases the first Beta for Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK. Domain Specific Languages Software Development Kit for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (DSL Tools) is a collection of resources designed to streamline the development of Visual Studio Domain Specific Language designers for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. According to Microsoft, the VS2010 DSL SDK package brings to the table both the tools and the templates necessary to permit developers to put together graphical or form-based DSL designs for the next iteration of the company's development platform and tools.

“Visual Studio 2010 ships with the DSL Tools and T4 runtime in the box in every edition since it is used by other tools in Visual Studio, such as the Linq to SQL designer. The DSL Tools SDK (for the DSL authoring experience) is shipped separately and depends on and exploits features in the Visual Studio SDK. This is the DSL SDK. This is a slight departure from Visual Studio 2008 where DSL Tools authoring shipped inside the VS SDK. Shipping separately gives us more flexibility on when we ship, in particular allows us to make more frequent improvements,” explained Jean-Marc Prieur, program manager at Microsoft.

The Redmond company started serving Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 the past week. Both solutions are required in order to leverage Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK Beta 1. Developers will be able to notice that Microsoft has “upgraded” the process associated with DSL deployment. Now a .ZIP archive packaged as VSIX can be unpacked in the extensions folder taking advantage of the VS2010 extension manager and the new features in the VS2010 SDK.

“Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 also brings 11 new DSL features: different models can now interact with each other, (and with Visual Studio Team System Architecture UML designers), using the ModelBus,” Prieur added. “Databinding support has been added, allowing Windows.Forms and WPF form-based designers to be created by binding a standard winform or WPF-based UI directly to DSL models. It is now possible to have completely or partially read only models. A number of UI enhancements have been added.”

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 DSL SDK Beta 1 is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is available for download here.