This week Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2010 RTM, so I think that it is the appropriate time to announce our plan.
First let’s begin from the company history. I don’t think that many of our clients know our motivation for building this product.
Dawliasoft started at 2005 as a software vendor in the medicine industry field, during 2 years we built a Hugh enterprise application contains many modules covers all medicine industry activities (Finance, Sales, HR, Costs, Document flow …etc.). Working agile helped us to deliver, test, and maintain pieces of software while developing the rest. Customers’ feedback helped us to kick off many of software challenges as Extensibility, Stability, Authorization, Authentication, Localization, Security, Profiling, and the ability of customization. We used .NET 2.0 with Windows Forms as UI and Datasets as data access provider, after a while we started using Enterprise Library which helped us a lot to overcome many of the previous challenges.
At the end of 2007 Microsoft new technologies Began to appear on the horizon, and all of developers knew that Microsoft started a new era on the software development during .NET 3.0, WPF, WF, WCF, LINQ, and some talked about Silverlight. This era made us disappointed for a while, where our BIG baby will be expired soon, of course we might still develop with the old fashion but we will be deprived of utilizing these new technologies.
At this point we realized that the change would be inevitable. We started looking around the new technologies: WPF still have many limitations, LINQ to SQL or the upcoming Entity Framework (or may be NHibernate), and the capabilities of Silverlight can’t determine yet. The other question was how many years our new baby will live until we will need to rebuild it? Of course we can increase its age by many design patterns like layering, separation of concerns, and cross cutting concerns … etc. but these design patterns did not achieve the abstraction from the implementation technology.
And when we talked about abstraction then we must stop at MDA (Model Driven Architecture) from OMG Group and Microsoft DSL-Tools as concrete implementation for this trend.
At December 2007 and after a while of closely studying concepts of MDA and details of DSL-Tools we started our product Sculpture for internal use.
At May 2008 we taking the decision of publishing it as open source to see how the developers thought in such a product, actually we got a great feedback that encouraged us continue developing it.
At March 2009 and after multiple preview versions we released Sculpture 1.0 final which won the admiration for a lot of developers. In this time we thought that we still have a lot to introduce throw this tool, this leads us to invest more while dropping some commercial components.
At August 2009 we ship Sculpture 2.0 which was a revolution of 1.0 with some commercial Molds.
Throw 2.0 we suffered a lot from the limitations of DSL-Tools as a comprehensive MDD framework which lead us to think on developing our own toolkit that gives us more capabilities on the Modeling and DSL worlds.
But those two worlds are wider than we expect starts from the modeling capabilities such as meta-data programming, model runtime, model validation, referential integrity, transaction management, model persistence, and model portability. And the DSL world potentials from graphical DSL with a new designer that utilize the WPF (and might Silverlight in the future) capabilities to give our traditional designers a new dimension, ends with Textual DSL that contains grammar, text coloring, intellisense, error detection, and most of other common todays editors capabilities.
We happily accept (and invest on) this challenge hopping produce the new Sculpture Platform as “The Ultimate .NET Modeling Platform”.
The above diagram illustrates the main components of our new platform.
1. Sculpture Toolkit which will be shipped as comprehensive MDD framework. The parts of this toolkit:
a) SModel: Throw this component you can author your own Model by describing its items with the meta-data Model (items like Domain Class, Domain Property, and Domain Feature). The models generated from SModel have a lot of features like WPF Binding, Validation, referential integrity, transaction monitor, and more.
b) SGenerate: Throw this component you can author your own generator, SGenerate utilizes the T4 Template and the new feature in VS2010 (Preprocessed Text Template) to help you author full code generator with multiple templates and other options like generating projects, project items, merge files …etc.
c) SDesign: Throw this component you can author your diagram designer within Visual Studio (and outside in the future), SDesign helps you build a complete, professional, Extendable, and rich designers based on your SModel. Using SGenerate inside SDesign gives you the opportunity to build your own designer that can generates code (or any other artifacts).
d) SPad: Throw this component you can author your own Textual DSL within Visual Studio. SPad helps you build a grammar and a comprehensive editor (Based on the new VS2010 WPF Editor), with few lines of code. With 10 to 20 lines you can build a full language that can be translated to SModel so you can interpret it at run time or use SGenerate to generate some code based on this textual language.
2. SExpert is the second product under Sculpture Platform. Actually SExpert is the current Sculpture where the word ‘Sculpture’ is reserved for the whole umbrella name of our platform. The name of ‘SExpert’ comes from our target to this product “Not Code Generation … But Experience Generation” where we will be careful to deliver software experience and best practice not just a bunch of templates. Using Sculpture toolkit to build SExpert will give a lot of potentials to this product. The next figure illustrates the transition from Sculpture to SExpert.
3. SAccess is another product based on SPad and SDesign focused on the data access layer, more details about this product will be published soon.
Of course SExpert 3.0 is the most interested component for our current clients. I want to reassure all current clients will get SExpert for free, where SExpert is just the new name of the current Sculpture product.
An important point to mention in Sculpture future is the name of our company “Dawliasoft” which currently doesn’t make sense for our main business, so while publishing the new stuff we will change the name to “Modelingsoft” which express what we exactly introduce.
Again the names are the only things that changed but the product and the company team (even address) doesn’t change.
The delivery dates of the new stuff will be as the following:
- Sculpture Toolkit 1.0 Beta will be released at the last of May.
- SExpert 3.0 Beta will be released at mid of June.
- Currently there is no target date for SAccess.