On March 24 part of the team of Bheudek traveled to Cambridge to attend the conference Code Generation 2012. Code Generation is an annual conference that brings together the most outstanding professionals in the fields of MDSD, LW, SPL and in general all those SW engineering disciplines based on automation and focused on improving the production process and the final product.
The conference was divided in two parts: Tuesday 27th Language Workbench Challenge and Wednesday 28th- Friday 30th the conference itself.

Language WorkBench Challenge
The goal of this event is not to find a winner but to compare, by solving the same exercise, the technical achievements on this area reached from the different tools.
Since every year the difficulty is increased over the previous one, this year the exercise was a heating circuit, therefore an eminently graphical domain versus the textual of the last year. It seems that for the next year the exercise will try to be an end-to-end process: from modeling to code generation and running on a platform.
About the competition we can honestly say that was a very interesting day where we could see and learn from others’ work, compare it with ours and especially we could share our opinions about these kind of tools.
About the tools, considering them all great projects, we will mention MetaEdit + (MetaCASE), AtomWeaver (Rui Curado) and Enso (Alex Loh, University of Texas).

The Conference
The rest of the event is focused on the presentation of experiences, case studies, management of tools, tutorials and especially on promoting contacts between the attendees. Presentations run from 9:00 to 17:00 with coffee and lunch breaks and then all kind of events like group talks (birds of the same feather), meetings around a beer, dinner and so on.
On those three days we could attend a wide range of presentations and among them we’d like to highlight:

• Markus Völter and Jan Bosch as keynote speakers and their presentations about designing DSLs and innovation through the architecture.
• MPS with several presentations of their tool and the content a LWB should have.
• Enrico Persiani / Ricardo Solmi and their interesting tool (whole platform) applied to a real project.
• Icinetic with Radarc and how to make MDSD in .NET.
• CollectionsPro and their practical experiences with continuous MDSD and persistent data.
• Holger Tschöpe and the development of a SPL at Eurocopter.
• Medata showing their modeling tool on the web.
• Steven Kelly and his thoughts about the importance of concrete syntax.
• Finally, in a more comprehensive technical field, the guest speaker David Woods and his presentation on how Apollo flew to the moon.

Definitely, a wonderful experience we hope to repeat as attendants or even as speakers presenting our achievements.
Thank the organizers for this great conference and also for the social events that allowed us to contact and share good times with attendees and speakers.