VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Oct. 26, 2004 — To help customers and partners extend the Visual Studio
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2005 Team System, Microsoft Corp. today announced a new framework and tool for building custom visual designers based on the modeling technology in Visual Studio 2005. During his keynote address — about changes in programming and software development to expect over the next 10 years — at the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, demonstrated how the new technology will enable customers and partners to better adapt Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework to meet specific business needs. With the new design tool, organizations will be able to build domain-specific language designers intended to automate redundant tasks within targeted problem domains.
Today’s announcement underscores the vital role global service integrators, service providers and tools vendors play in complementing and extending the Microsoft®
Visual Studio product line. Demonstrating the rich ecosystem around the Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Borland Software Corp., Kinzan Inc., Nationwide Building Society, Siemens and Unisys Corp. announced their intent to use the new technology to deliver domain-specific language designers for their respective vertical or horizontal domains.
“Nationwide Building Society is excited to collaborate with Microsoft on domain-driven development using the Visual Studio 2005 Team System,” said Mike Warwick, chief architect at Nationwide Building Society. “We have developed customized domain-specific language designers for the Visual Studio 2005 Team System to capture our unique business process semantics more effectively.”
At the conference Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the framework and tool for building customized domain-specific language designers. The CTP will help customers and partners test its use with the visual designer technology, formerly code-named “Whitehorse,” that will ship with the Visual Studio 2005 Team System. This approach is designed to help development organizations deliver service-oriented applications on the Microsoft .NET Framework more productively with visual design tools that streamline the development process and more stringently focus developers on solutions for their problem domains.
Software Factories: Vision for Evolving Software Development
Domain-specific languages are part of a larger industry initiative called Software Factories. Although full realization of Software Factories is years away, Microsoft and industry partners are building on the technologies made available today to deliver customizable tools, processes and architectures for the Visual Studio 2005 Team System. These customizations, collectively referred to as a Software Factory, enable organizations to streamline their development processes to focus on the unique business and technical aspects of problem domains.
Today developers build applications from the ground up using generic tools, ad hoc processes and custom architectures, a practice that is largely time-consuming and error-prone. Software Factories promise to tailor the development life cycle to support the rapid development of customized applications for specific vertical and horizontal business domains. Software Factories free developers to focus on the more creative aspects of software development by increasing the level of automation for rote and menial tasks common to each business domain.
“As software development evolves, customers are asking for a faster, less expensive and more reliable way to build specific kinds of applications tuned to their business, such as vertical markets like healthcare and CRM,” said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “The extensibility and customization built into the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System coupled with the broader ecosystem’s domain expertise offer a more streamlined vision for application development as represented by Software Factories.”
“Siemens and Microsoft share a vision for domain-driven development. Siemens sees this as a major driver toward increased software productivity because the models can be more easily reused. Current modeling tools designed for object-oriented analysis and design do not address business-specific domain needs effectively,” said Reinhold Achatz, vice president of Corporate Technology at Siemens. “We believe that using Visual Studio Team System to facilitate easy design, customization and specialization of Software Factories will lead to increased software productivity for the industry.”
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