Advanced research with DSL tools right here DownUnder!

Liming just told me about the exciting research work he and his colleagues are NICTA are doing in the area of Model Driven Development. He is currently testing out his research ideas using Domain Specific Language with Visual Studio 2005.

Here is a description of what they're doing taken from the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering website:

Model Driven Development (MDD) is about raising the level of abstraction for software development, providing more powerful concepts for capturing and reusing knowledge in platforms and languages. Different methodologies exist for practicing MDD, such as OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Microsoft's Domain Specific Language (DSL). The inseparable link between models and code created through MDD demands consistent management of models and code in a single IDE. This research is to apply our existing experience in MDA to DSL-based MDD by developing domain specific designers as plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio. Students will use the DSL toolkit to design their own high level domain specific language (such as performance testing, pattern integration) and capture reusable assets and best practices in supporting infrastructure as libraries, code generation templates and guidance toolkits. Students will be exposed to leading edge research in software architecture domain and latest industry tools especially Visual Studio 2005 and its DSL/GAT toolkits...

best of luck to the researchers! I look forward to seeing some great research results and I'm eager to apply them to our daily software engineering work!