Experiences on DSL Tools for Visual Studio

Within their application do mains, domain-specific languages offer substantial gains in expressiveness, productivity, and ease of use, compared with general-purpose programming languages. Despite the many advantages of domain-specific languages, their use has been unduly limited, by a lack of support in developmental environments. Recently, microsoft introduced some support by constructing domain-specific languages with a plug-in 'DSL tools for visual studio'. This paper gives language designers tips on developing a domain-specific language using this tool and describes the experiences of an end-user of constructing a language. Another contribution of this paper is a comparison of tools with the traditional approach by the implementation of a domain-specific language, done on the same representative language.