DSL Tools: Look and (soon) feel

We're really close now with our new release - with luck, you should be able to get your hands on it in the next few days.  I know you're dying to spend your Christmas holiday vacation creating domain specific languages for Visual Studio.

 

One feature that we've updated this time is the look and feel of the Domain Model Designer (this was called the Object Model Designer in the last release).  I've posted a large example of our new look - beware this is a 1024 x 3972 pixel jpg file. 

 

Here's a small snippet:

 

Snippet of the updated DMD rendering

 

For interest, some of our design criteria for this new look included:

Use the same visual cues as the Class Designer where the represented objects are the same or similar.

Only use the variability in a single visual cue to denote the variability in a single property of the underlying object.  For example, the border of a domain class shape denotes whether the modifier of the class is abstract (dashed), none/concrete(regular charcoal) or sealed (heavy charcoal).

 

We hope these changes will contribute to making use of the tool clearer, easier and an overall more engaging experience.

 

N.B. Apologies for editing this post, but the image upload didn't work first time.