Introducing the Visual Designers

Meet the Visual Studio 2005 designers—Application Designer, Class Designer, Deployment Designer, Logical Datacenter Designer, and System Designer. Excerpt: First to set the scene: The Object Management Group (OMG) has a licensed brand called Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). MDA is an approach to MDD based on constructing platform-independent UML models (PIMs) supplemented with one or more platform-specific models (PSMs). Microsoft also has an approach to model-driven development, based not on the generic UML but on a set of tightly focused domain-specific languages (DSLs). This approach to model-driven development is part of a Microsoft initiative called Software Factories, which in turn is part of a wider Dynamic Systems Initiative.