Patrick Cooney's Weblog

A visual language for separating concerns

2005-01-27

The screen shot below is taken from a designer I built using the latest DSL Tools CTP for Visual Studio. The language/diagram is tentatively called a concern map

The designer lets a programmer make a basic box and arrow diagram (see the black boxes below), representing significant concerns within a system (layer, sub-system, anything of interest). The magic is in the little green boxes - these contain expressions which bind the black box to real artefacts in the IDE (think classes, methods, documents, whatever).

That's the idea, at least. I've already got the heavy lifting done for binding to code constructs by writing query expressions. In this case, the green boxes will contain XPath : I've implemented the underlying query capability by disassembling from IL (for code, classes, methods etc) and PDB (for file info) to an XML representation, which can be XPathed, and one day XQueried.

The next step is to integrate this with the concern map designer, so a programmer can double click one of the boxes and load up the related classes, methods etc. in the IDE. Luckily the DSL tools make the designer source available, and I've managed to hijack the click events on the canvas. Expect a prototype next week.

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