This paper overviews the Modeling Turnpike (mTurnpike) project, which investigates a generic model-driven development framework that supports various domain-specific solutions (i.e. modeling, programming and development process to directly deal with domain concepts). This paper identifies a series of research issues to create such a framework, and describes how the mTurnpike project addresses those issues. The proposed framework allows developers to model and program domain concepts (as UML models and attribute-oriented programs) and to transform them to compilable code. This paper also describes future directions of the mTurnpike project.