Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools

11. Designing a DSL

Introduction

In Chapter 2, we discussed how a DSL is developed incrementally and bottom-up. You begin with specific application code and gradually parameterize it. First turn your existing code into a set of templates—so that if they were not modified, they would just generate the original code. Then gradually replace pieces of the templates by template expressions; the DSL develops alongside, as the means to express these statements’ parameters.

We contrasted this with a top-down approach that begins by considering the domain as a collection of interrelated concepts—those represented in the DSL’s domain model. That approach has a number of potential advantages. It gets much more quickly and directly to a substantial DSL; ...