Well, the main components of the DSL Tools are the DSL Designer, the T4 template generator, and the template code for the generated solutions. There's nothing to stop you changing that last item as much as you like. The DSL Designer can only be used within the stated authoring environment, and the T4 template generator can only be used inside the stated user environment. But you could do a hyper-customization that throws away the entirety of the template solutions, and builds something else that maybe uses the DSL Designer and T4 for authoring, and uses neither at the user level. Quite a lot of work....

Thanks a lot Alan. I played with the designer host according to the MSDN article "Create And Host Custom Designers With The .NET Framework 2.0". I am thinking of just using the DSL designer so end user can create some sort of flow chart type diagram which would be used in our application domain. I may or may not need the DSL code generation part. It sounds like I should be able to do it with a bit of work. I will give it a try. I only have the express version now, I guess I will need to wait till we get the pro version.

Hi Santabo,

I believe Alan was suggesting that you could generate your own graphical application from your DSL model. Unfortunately, in V1, using our graphical design surface outside of Visual Studio is not supported.

Thanks for the clarification. Even if hosting outside Visual Studio is not supported, do you know if something will definitely prevent it from working outside VS? If DSL designer is following the generic design time architecture of VS 2005, I don't see what will stop it from working outside Visual Studio. May be you can shed some light here.

What I am trying to do is create a visio like end user application without using VS, Visio or third party software. If you know of an easier way to do that without using DSL designer surface, let me know. That will be a big help.

I recently saw a demo of a .Net application hosting a deployment diagram out of VS2005. The diagram was built programmatically from the configuration data and updated live, but it was not modifiable graphically by the end-user.

So it seems we can host a designer diagram out of VS2005.

It was a "week-end" project to enhance the configuration module of an application. I thus guess it didn't require a lot of work to do it...

Unfortunately, I had no access to the source code or design of the application.

Luc