Just loaded the VSX SDK 1.1 for my brand new laptop, and fired it up. Ignoring that baby #2 is (was) due 3 days ago, and might appear before I finish typing this, here we go.

I have decided to build the newly named project Morpork in my own time, as it has not so much fallen of the radar at work, radar has apparently been ignored too. So much for my bosses assurances 'I have already sold it, just build it for me!'. As it's been a while since my Sharp Develop efforts, I may even decide to Open Source the code (I'll have to check my current contract to see if that is allowed.)

 Anyway, starting small , I will post a few of those fairly obvious but annoying gotchas that may befall newbies until I get back up to speed and start to crack open the bonnet again.

 One thing I noticed in my past DSL coding was that sometimes my Toolbox Icon bitmaps showed and sometimes they didn't. Secondly, the fact that my toolbox icons were constrained to the bitmap type (don't even get me started on the cursor. cur type), I had no way to define a transperency.

 Neither of these questions are that tricky to crack. That horrid 'no one will ever use it, so it can be a transparency mask' #FF00FF colour appears to be translated as a transparency layer. Black in some experiments, when used as a surrounding colour to an image, also appears to have been translated on a few occasions as transparent, but I will need to test further to see ascertain if this is the case. Just rely on putrid pink, and your transparnecy should work fine.

 The only bitmaps accepted by the toolbox are 16 x 16. Quite why this is the case, I do not know, but I am assuming educated guessing it has to do with the C++ core of Visual Studio, and a defined data structure being required by the toolbox icon that a different size icon does not conform to, but it's at least 7 years since I coded C++ in anger, and I never touched graphics (over and above the MFC *spits*), so I am kind of making that assumption up.

I'm looking forward to getting into some deeper topics very soon (time lost to newborn birth notwithstanding).

I have actually been getting a fair bit of positive feedback for this blog, something I wasn't really expecting as

1.  I am talking about a fairly domain specific area of technology (crap pun intentional, if not funny)
2. The DSL technology is rather new
3. I have not been updating recently

Thinking about this, points 1 and 2 actually make it more likely that anyone searching for information on VSX DSL are probably going to land here sooner or later, which only goes to make point 3 all the more embarrassing.

Excuses: Despite may religious tirade for DSL technology, over at Insert Company Name here my custom Meta Modeller (or Modeler for any Americans reading) application has been put on the back burner until such time as it gets put back on the front burner.

I am very close to writing the damn thing in my own time, however a 17 month old son and a pregnant wife so ready to pop that she'll probably go into labour before I hit Save Post ensures that the second I get home, my digital life (except where it pertains to watching the millionth showing of an In The Night Garden DVD) may as well be compared to a 19th century Quaker community.

I would like to say I have been putting most of my blogging efforts into www.obviouscode.com, but a quick visit there would reveal that to be a lie too, although I do have at least 3 posts I really need to get the time to type.

So, with a popular requests from the community that numbers almost 5, as well as a realisation that I am quickly losing my status as an Australian DSL Early Adopter, I shall begin to update as soon as I dust off my VSX Shell and polish the T4.

I promise ;)

This is a nice one I discovered this morning, by setting the Flag Property of an enumeration, enumeration bitwise values and an editor box are supplied by default.

Consider we have an property, for the sake of this example I'll use Font, that uses an enumeration to define its state, with possible values of Bold, Underlined, Italic etc.

Where an owning object of such a property, like Pen, may have be in multiple states concurrerntly (eg, a Bold, Underlined state), we could define each property as a boolean, to say that property is in affect or not, or we could use bitwise shifting of an enumeration.  To do this we would define our enumeration as having set, bitshifted, values:

We could then set our object state as follows:

This would effectively set the Font property (confusingly, sorry, of type FontProperty) to be 3, or 0011, the amalgamation of 0001 and 0010, which is basic binary addition, a nice way of describing multiple states. This can be translated back as shown below:

We can do a similar thing in a DSL definition: 

Define a Domain Enumeration (essentially just an enumeration like any other in .NET that is created in context of a DSL Definition) from the DSL explorer

Set the Enumeration Name property, and the flag property to True

Create the enumeration values

Note, the bitwise integer value of the enumeration has been automatically set

Add a Domain Property to your owning Domain Class with your enumeration as its type

Now, when the property is used in the generated DSL, a checked box editor window has been automatically provided, and the correct bitwise value set

I am not a Microsoft Developer (in the sense that I do not work for MS) , I do not (as yet) have a particularly indepth knowledge of DSL, in fact I can honestly say I am somewhat of a noob.

I first learnt about the VSX DSL at a session given by Tom Hollander at TechEd 2007, however it wasn't until I listened to Ken Levy on DotNetRocks that I really understood the possibilities.

So what I plan to do here is use this as a place to jot down my problems, successes and failures, at worst to allow me to revisit them later, but hopefully to start a conversation with like developers having like issues.

My role is architect and technical lead at a small consultancy in Sydney