Microsoft DSL Tools provides an easy way to create visual languages and designers that can be hosted in Visual Studio 2008, but sometimes it could be interesting to distribute the designers to user who don’t have Visual Studio 2008 installed. This can be archived by using the Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell to host the DSL designers, but implementing this can be a difficult process.
As a sample of this kind of application you can look at the Storyboard designer on CodePlex or the screen dump below.
After spending some time on creating a standalone application based on Microsoft DSL Tools and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (isolated), I have decided to write end-to-end tutorial describing all the steps necessary to create a fully deployable standalone DSL Tools based application that can be used without Visual Studio 2008 installed. All the information on how to create such an application is available on the Internet, but only as separate pieces, so it can be difficult putting it all together.
The primary audience for this tutorial will be developers familiar with DSL Tools who wants to create a standalone DSL application, but don’t have a lot of experience with Visual Studio extensibility and Visual Studio Shell development in general. Anybody else interested in the subject can of cause also use the tutorial. I will not spend a lot of time on DSL Tools, the focus will be on how to create a standalone application based on a DSL designer.
I will post the tutorial on my blog as it progresses and add links from this post.
Table of content (links will be add when new posts come)