You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Wednesday, Mar 4, 2009, 2:37 PM in Oslo
January 2009 "Oslo" SDK Refresh
The "Oslo" team heard you! There was some "regression in the quality of the bits" in the Jan CTP from the PDC CTP that affected you guys in our 3-pane mode for grammar editing in Intellipad (aka the bits are worse than they used to be). It was just a sample, but it's so so useful, that language developers are using the hell out of it, which means they're running into "performance and robustness issues" (which means it was slow and crashed) and we've fixed the worst ones in the January 2009 "Oslo" SDK Refresh.
You have to uninstall the three things that are called "Oslo" before you install and there are no new features or other changes -- this is just to make the 3-pane mode better.
Please bang on it, ask your questions and report your issues. Thanks!
Oh, and 3-pane mode will be an official part of the product in future CTPs, so it will receive the same testing love as the rest of the project. We heard you!
Monday, Mar 2, 2009, 8:10 PM in Conference
DSL DevCon: The 13th Talk
Magnus Christerson, the Vice President of Product Management from Intentional Software Corp, founded by Charles Simonyi, is giving the very last talk at the DSL DevCon, so make sure to stick around!
Also, seats are filling up FAST, faster than any of the other DevCons. Make sure to register now if you're coming! And don't forget, it's free!
Monday, Feb 23, 2009, 12:11 PM in Conference
DSL DevCon Speakers and Sessions Announced!
Apparently there is quite a bit of pent up demand for this conference, as there were more than 50 session proposals for only 12 slots and we've already filled half the seats with just pre-registrations.
Sessions include an M deep dive by Paul Vick, DSLs in Groovy by Guillaume Laforge, DSLs in Eclipse by Markus Voelter, a functional vs. dynamic DSLs smackdown by Ted Neward, a DSL for Pixel Effects from Adobe and last, but certainly not least, giving the keynote for the entire conference, the undisputed Duke of DSLs himself, Maaaaaartin Foooooowler-er-er-er!
Come to Lang.NET and stay for the DSL DevCon or just come to the DevCon, but whatever you do, sign up for the FREE DSL DevCon right now! All 5 of the other DevCons have sold out and I expect this one to be no different.
Thursday, Feb 19, 2009, 12:00 PM in Fun
I love Microsoft's terrible automated voice attendant
Long-time readers may recall when I got an angry caller from a Vista user that had trouble configuring it the way they wanted it. They got to me because they were looking for "sales" using the automated voice attendant that matched my last name instead ("Sells") and forwarded him to me in the middle of a 1:1 in my office. Not wanting to let a customer go away angry, I stopped what I was doing and did my best to try to help.
It happened again today, except for an angry middle-aged guy, I got a call from the sweetest 12-year-old girl you'd ever want to talk to. Her Word CD had gotten scratched and she needed a replacement so she could write a big paper due next week. I considered telling her that I wasn't in sales or support or getting her number and calling her back (I was IM'ing with four other people at the time and I was late for a meeting), but she was so earnest that I just couldn't turn her away.
Instead, I took her name, address and email, went to the MS store and purchased her a copy of Office 2007, which I then had sent to her place via 2-day shipping, all the time assuring her that it wouldn't cost her a dime. I ended up using my own personal quota for discounted software and charging $60 to my MS AMEX, but I would've spent my own money (and still might if my boss reads this and rejects my expense report : ).
She was so grateful and it made my day to solve her problem. I love our customers and I hope the terrible robot on the main MS line keeps sending 'em my way.
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, 11:01 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Mix09: Developing RESTful Services & Clients w/ M
Doug Purdy and I will be giving an "M" talk about web stuff at this year's Mix:
Learn how Web developers can use "M", a new language for describing data, metadata and domain specific languages, to enhance RESTful services like HTTP, JSON, RSS/Atom, and more. Also see how "M" can be used on premise or in the cloud to achieve greater development productivity and to create more compelling customer experiences.
Monday, Feb 16, 2009, 2:33 PM in Oslo
Martin Fowler on DSL Migration
Martin, who has recently agreed to be the keynote speaker for the DSL DevCon, has a nice piece on DSL migration strategies.
While Oslo has no direct support for the incremental migration strategy to migrate DSL documents forward, we absolutely provide the tools for building it yourself. We do have very nice support for model-based migration, which keeps a parser around for each version of the DSL and produces the same underlying semantic model (which we call MGraph).
Monday, Feb 16, 2009, 2:14 PM in Oslo Featured Content
More from Stephen Modeling an Application in Oslo
Stephen has three more installments in his series on modeling an application in Oslo: Discovery, Domain Entities and Refactoring and Transforming MGraph to TSQL. It's fascinating to watch him use the platform starting from scratch. Recommended!
Monday, Feb 2, 2009, 8:12 PM in Oslo
Stephen Forte: Oslo Confessions of a .NET Programm
Stephen's been turning himself into an Oslo programmer:
"Telerik is building some cool Oslo utilities and I am in the middle of designing them. As I was talking to Chris about some of the specs the other day, he asked me: “What are you using to keep track of the metadata of your application in your design process?” I was like: “Pen, paper, whiteboard, Word and Excel.” He said why are you not using Oslo? Then it struck me, I was in .NET programmer mode. So last decade. While I am using Visual Studio 2008, WPF, SQL Server 2008 and the Oslo SDK to build an application for Oslo, I was not using Oslo to help build the application."
Worth watching.
Monday, Feb 2, 2009, 8:51 AM in Oslo Editorial
Welcome to the January 2009 "Oslo" SDK!
Hello again from Chris and Kent, your editors on the "Oslo" Developer Center. On Friday, January 30th, we released the January 2009 CTP of the “Oslo” SDK. This release was primarily a quality release, but we’ve also added some new features (which you can read about in the release notes). My favorite of these is token actions, which lets me do things like specify a string in a .mg file but pull out the guts without keeping the double quotes that surround it:
token String = Word | a:'"' s:('""' | ^'"')+ b:'"' => s;
If you’re building grammars, you know why this is cool and if you’re not, what are you waiting for?
Also, you’ll want to check out the new Modeling Patterns and Guidelines document where we start to explore common modeling tasks and how to approach them in M. This document will grow a great deal over time and if there’s some particular topic you’d like to see covered, drop us a line.
In the three short months since the PDC, we’ve tried to keep you up to date on fresh content from the team showing off how we think our customers will want to use or showing off features you might not have known about. The ones in this category I think will get you pointed in the right direction are "Oslo" Basics: Build Metadata-Based Applications With The "Oslo" Platform, Mr. EPL and Spork.
Also, "Oslo" has generated a ton of buzz in the community, including the forum, the connect bug database and in the blogosphere. The ones we think you should take particular note of are featured on the DevCenter as soon as we find them. Items I really think you should check out are Why Oslo is Important, MSchema and Decorator Tables and Creating a Logo/Turtle Graphics Textual DSL using Oslo MGrammar.
But wait, there’s more! If you’d really like some focused time on "Oslo," there are not one but two training courses, one from Agilitrain and one from PluralSight.
Finally, if you’re an MGrammar fan, you’ll love the DSL DevCon, April 16 & 17 in Redmond, WA right after the Lang.NET conference.
Our goal on the DevCenter is bi-directional communication, so we’ve worked hard to make sure we keep our eyes open for all of the wonderful things you’re putting "Oslo" to use on. However, we’re only human, so if we miss something, whether it’s something you’ve built with "Oslo" or a question or piece of feedback, don’t hesitate to let us know!
Also, in case you don’t know what "Oslo" is or how to get started, you should check out the Getting Started section on the DevCenter home page.
Keep those cards and letters coming!
XXOO, Chris Sells & Kent Sharkey
Friday, Jan 30, 2009, 3:58 PM in Oslo
Bill Gibson on Domain Modeling
Bill Gibson is an architect on the Oslo team and is in charge of our M coding conventions and modeling patterns documents. He's started blogging recently and has a nice post about domain modeling in Oslo. He's a good guy to hit up with questions about how to model various constructs in M or just modeling questions in general. He's been doing this modeling thing forever...
Tuesday, Jan 27, 2009, 2:45 PM in Oslo
Agilitrain: Model Driven Development with Oslo
Holy cow -- another Oslo course, this one from Agilitrain:
"Microsoft's Oslo is trying to change the way that software is designed, developed and delivered. They are introducing a platform for building real, scalable and manageable model-driven applications. Being an early adopter of this platform will prepare you for our changing world.
"This course will show you how to build models and domain specific languages and use them all at runtime using the Repository to create great applications for your users."
I'm a huge Shawn Wildermuth fan (Shawn's the author of this course and the instructor). Recommended.
Sunday, Jan 25, 2009, 5:26 PM in Oslo
All Technology Has Downsides
Rocky makes some good points in his recent piece on DSLs (DSLs – fun, cool, but maybe a bad idea? ) -- basically, who's going to learn the DSL when the folks that know it move on? That's one potential downside of the proliferation of DSLs and I could give you more.
However, all technologies come with these downsides, e.g.
- Managed environments make new programmers forget what's under the hood (and in some cases, actually afraid to look).
- Horseless carriages produce pollution.
- iPhones are killing the English language by encouraging the use of "words" like "lol," "afaik" and "wtf."
- Airplanes crash.
- Very very bad code written in Visual Basic can still do the right thing.
- Fonts let every letter look like a ransom note.
- etc.
The point isn't whether a technology has downsides or not -- of course, it does. The point is whether the upsides outweigh the downsides. In the case of DSLs and model-driven development all up, the "Oslo" team is making a big bet that we can make you overall more productive when digging ourselves out of the IT software backlog hole. Will we be? I think so, but we have a lot of work to do before we'll know for sure.
And how do we reduce the impact of the downsides of a new technology? By knowing that they're there, which is why Rocky's commentary is so useful. Recommended.
Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009, 5:24 PM in Oslo Featured Content
ExtractM "Oslo" Sample
ExtractM is a sample command-line tool for extracting M source code from compiled M images by Shannon Koh, a developer on the "Oslo" team. Enjoy!
Sunday, Jan 18, 2009, 10:45 PM in Fun
There once was a man from Duluth
nearly 40 years old; past his youth!
But tonight with a smile,
he swam non-stop for a mile.
First time in his life - that's the truth!
I swam a mile when I was 17 and again last summer, but never non-stop before. I know it doesn't compare to real swimmers (it took me 45 minutes), but I've been swimming for less than a year. Plus i found two meaningful rhymes for "Duluth." I rock. : )
Sunday, Jan 18, 2009, 11:57 AM in Oslo
Dan Vanderboom: Why Oslo Is Important
I couldn't have said it better myself. Very much worth the read. Enjoy.