This quarter at Neumont University I am working on the NORMA (Neumont Object Role Modeling Architect) Project. This is an open-source package that is built with the Visual Studio DSL Tools SDK. Terry Haplin formalized the ORM (Object Role Modeling) notation and is currently a Professor here at Neumont. To find out more about ORM you can browse to Terry Haplin’s website www.orm.net. To find out more about NORMA you can download it off of source-forge.
I will be documenting my work on the project here on my blog, feel free to follow along!
Goal
My goal for the quarter is to update the Fact Editor window to the new managed classes available in the Visual Studio 2005 SDK. The Fact Editor was originally coded directly implementing the COM interfaces needed to create code windows and language services. This feature of the package will be updated to these new base classes provided by Microsoft to make future versions easier to use and update.
Baby Steps
The first few steps in completing my goal are
1) Familiarizing myself with the Visual Studio 2005 SDK
2) Learning what interfaces used currently relate to the base classes now provided by Microsoft
3) Getting a basic editor up and running
4) Implement syntax highlighting
5) Implement catching keyboard strokes
6) Implement intellisense
7) Implement word completion
8) Implement adding facts entered in the Editor to the ORM diagram
These are some of the initial steps that I came to with minimal knowledge of the SDK and the current state the tool.