UML or DSL: Which one to choose?

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The release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate marks the first time that architects will have a set of UML and DSL modeling tools in the same development environment. While the concepts of UML and DSL modeling have been around for a long time, this is the first tool release that effectively combines them in one product and enables rich integration among multiple models.
Just about every software architect and developer has at least some familiarity with the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Created by Rumbaugh, Booch, and Jacobsen as a means to hasten the adoption for object-oriented technologies, UML 1.1 was proposed to and accepted by the OMG in 1997. Since that time, UML has evolved into its current form of version 2.2. Yet, for these past 12 to 13 years, developers and architects who work within the Microsoft suite of tools were resigned to call upon Microsoft Visio or third-party software to try to reap the rewards that the uniformity of UML promised. The lack of UML tooling and support in Microsoft's main development environment, Visual Studio, has been a void that many architects and developers have long wished was filled.
Instead, Microsoft provided a rich authoring environment for graphical domain-specific languages when it released the Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Tools capability with Visual Studio 2005. The Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate release adds—among other things— the ability to have DSL diagrams interact with each other and with UML diagrams. It also adds UML 2.x–compliant (or "logical") class, component, activity, sequence, and use-case diagrams.

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