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.

Went to see Marc Newsom speak at the Design Museum on Tuesday. They have his Ford concept car on display. It looks even better up close.

Twenty four hours before I see the Gang of Four at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Everyone is biting their style (if not their politics) at the moment.

Watched Touch of Evil tonight - is this the best film nobody has ever seen?

I used Skype for the first time today. If you haven't heard of it, it is an internet (UDP?) telephony program that lets me make free voice calls over my broadband connection to anybody else who has the software.

I chatted for about half an hour to my brother in Australia today, and the quality was great. More importantly, the latency was better than I usually get over the phone.

First up: The incomparable Malcolm Gladwell is exchanging mail with James "Wisdom of Crowds" Surowiecki on slate this week. Also check out Gladwell's session (MP3 or AAC) at Poptech!, via ITConversations.

Also: I usually feel homesick in winter, so it is great to hear some thick Aussie accents in the G'Day World Podcast. I have no idea who these guys are, but they have the secret sauce. Totally unscripted, rambling, uncensored and often uninvited. Check out the bizarre chat with William Luu. And the Doc Searls cast is ok too.

VCs: Venture capitalists are blogging interesting stuff like crazy. The best: Steve Brotman, David Hornik, Jeff Nolan, Brad Feld, Ed Sim and Fred Wilson.

I've spent the last week trying out the Visual Studio 2005 DSL Tools (December release). The language design part (see above) is bullet proof. The code gen, used for creating designers (graphical editors for the language you define), is not. I'm finally on top of it, thanks to some help from Msft.

For anyone else struggling with the code gen, the [your language name].dd file within the designer project is probably the source of your problems. At the moment, this has to edited by hand to stay in synch with the object model. Details of the exact format of this file will be public soon.

Valley of the temples.