To help customers and partners extend the Visual Studio® 2005 Team System, Microsoft Corp. today announced a new framework and tool for building custom visual designers based on the modeling technology in Visual Studio 2005. During his keynote address -- about changes in programming and software development to expect over the next 10 years -- at the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, demonstrated how the new technology will enable customers and partners to better adapt Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework to meet specific business needs. With the new design tool, organizations will be able to build domain-specific language designers intended to automate redundant tasks within targeted problem domains.

Today's announcement underscores the vital role global service integrators, service providers and tools vendors play in complementing and extending the Microsoft® Visual Studio product line. Demonstrating the rich ecosystem around the Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Borland Software Corp., Kinzan Inc., Nationwide Building Society, Siemens and Unisys Corp. announced their intent to use the new technology to deliver domain-specific language designers for their respective vertical or horizontal domains.