MetaCase (www.metacase.com), provider of the leading domain-specific modeling (DSM) environment, MetaEdit+, today announced a new extension for Microsoft Visual Studio. The extension allows users to work with MetaEdit+ models directly from Visual Studio. It also automatically imports source code generated from the MetaEdit+ models into Visual Studio, and builds and runs it there.
Unlike other modeling approaches, Domain-Specific Modeling utilizes high-level models which describe things in the terms of a company’s individual problem domain, instead of attempting to visualize the code developers will write. These models directly mirror real-world objects, allowing developers to make better designs with less effort and enabling them to generate full, production-quality code that interfaces correctly with their existing software platforms, frameworks, components and libraries.
The MetaEdit+ extension brings to Visual Studio the possibility to use several domain-specific languages in an integrated manner. Model elements can be shared and reused in multiple models, even across different languages. Code generators can access multiple models in different languages, and generate to multiple files. The link to MetaEdit+ also broadens Visual Studio’s model visualization possibilities, allowing models to be expressed as diagrams, matrices and tables – even at the same time.
