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April Fool's Is Visual Studio Team System Rosario to include the long-awaited PowerPoint plug-in? Well, that's the buzz down at the old "Firkin and Flowchart". The jokes about the "compile button" in PowerPoint that generates working software from marketing B/S will have to be revisited as Microsoft announces PowerPoint Integration for VSTS, to be known as PISS.

Joking apart, the business process model behind automated developments frequently exists only in the minds of a company's innovative "knowledge workers" and in the office business productivity presentations given to the board over lunch at places like the IoD. By the time technicians attempt to capture these golden nuggets in the dross of something boring like UML, much of the essential insight will be lost. This is a much more serious gap than the supposed gap between business analysts and the IT group.

Now you can simply design new software products in conjunction with the marketing department and present them to the CEO in PowerPoint. Then, just press the "export to VSTS" button, in order to generate DSLs for these specific applications. Of course, these will merely represent first cut abstractions of the final product and you have to fill in the implementation detail in C#, but this will still go a long way towards addressing the vast gap between marketing vision and the laws of computer science that so bedevils our most innovative technology companies.

Once again, Microsoft innovation has extended the system development process beyond the confines of sterile academic rigour in order to deliver what businesses really need. Spokesperson Anthony Blare, Microsoft local government evangelist, says: "This is the most important innovation in automated business processing since Maundy Gregory invented automated political funding."

Rest assured, Register Developer will keep you informed on progress in this fascinating area. ®

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