At this year's Code Generation conference in Cambridge, we're delighted to be able to offer our hands-on session teaching Domain-Specific Modeling with MetaEdit+, which was voted best session at last year's conference. We'll build five modeling languages and generators from scratch in 2½ hours on Wednesday. If you've never created your own modeling language, or have only used things like GMF and think all tools must be similar, you have to see this!

That's a hands-on talk, but there are also wider issues: Most MDD projects fail before they even get started, or drag on but never really fulfill their promise. The reasons are as often human as technical. By knowing what tactics actually work and what don’t many counter-intuitive or never considered by developers you can avoid the pitfalls and frustration of seeing your good ideas wasted.

We'll be looking at this in a new talk at Code Generation 2010: Proven best practices for successful MDD adoption (Thursday 10:45-12:00). This is intended for lead developers, team leads, architects, CTOs, managers - and also anybody trying to help or encourage other companies to adopt MDD.

The presentation will show you the roadmap for successfully introducing MDD into your organization, on both technical and human levels. Technical phases include the domain selection criteria, technical preparedness, language definition and testing, and the final roll-out. On the human level we will look at selling the idea, building mindshare, keeping momentum going, and managing organizational change. Drawing from our experience over the past fifteen years we will pinpoint the key challenges organizations usually face during MDD adoption, and offer some practical solutions to overcome them.

We will lead people through the technical tasks, people issues and process best practices in a tutorial format: teaching supported by slides, examples, cases, discussions and questions. Participants’ own experiences and situations will be discussed throughout, so if you have a story to tell, do come along. We’ll see if we can do a quick survey of participants to find which obstacles were most frequently encountered, and which were most serious.