I'm really pleased to announce that Microsoft and MetaCase -- in the persons of Alan Cameron Wills and myself -- will be co-operating once again to run the Workshop on Agile Develoment with Domain-Specific Languages at XP2006, June 19th. Last year the workshop was in Sheffield, UK, which was great for Alan; this time it's in Oulu, Finland, so a nice piece of symmetry for the co-organizers. And while Sheffield has nice cutlery factories ;-), Oulu has the midnight sun, which has to be seen to be believed: beautiful! Ah OK, the Pennine hills around Sheffield are beautiful too: I grew up around there, and really enjoyed last year's train ride through the hills from Manchester to Sheffield.

The theme of the workshop is "DSM with full code generation: the ultimate refactoring tool?". As someone who practices XP (admittedly as poorly as everything else I do), it's been fascinating to see the parallels it has with DSM. Pretty much all the agile practices can be transferred straight into modeling -- Agile Modeling is one way, sort of, but it's when you can build your own modeling language and generators that things really start coming into focus. Here's the workshop blurb:

This workshop will continue the success of last year in investigating the application of Domain Specific Languages within Agile development. A Domain Specific Language (DSL) is designed to express the requirements and solutions of a particular business or architectural domain. SQL, GUI designers, workflow languages and regular expressions are familiar examples. In recent years, Domain-Specific Modeling has yielded spectacular productivity improvements in domains such as telephony and embedded systems. By creating graphical or textual languages specific to the needs of an individual project or product line within one company, DSM offers maximum agility. With current tools, creating a language and related tool support is fast enough to make DSM a realistic possibility for projects of all sizes.

...and to refactor, you just change the generator!

It's just under four weeks to the start of the workshop, and three to the deadline for submissions (freeform and relaxed, like everything at XP!). I already know of one customer and one reader of this blog who is going to be there -- hope you can make it too!