Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet for category 'OsloEditorial' via ATOM 1.0 csells on twitter

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.



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

0 comments



Monday, Oct 27, 2008, 10:33 AM in Oslo Editorial

The Oslo Developer Center: Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the "Oslo" Developer Center, your one-stop shop for all things "Oslo." Do you need to learn how M works (or what the heck it is?)? Do you want to sprinkle some of that repository stuff into your SQL Server? Do you need a quick video tutorial on the "Oslo" SDK tools? Then you've come to the right place!

This DevCenter is a bi-directional communication channel between the "Oslo" product team and you, our customers. We have all kinds of things we want to tell you about Oslo and all manner of ways for us to tell it to you, e.g. articles, videos, screencasts, samples, tools, etc. But more important than that, we want to hear from you, so we've set up a forum for you to ask questions and a Connect site for you to report bugs. And, if you blog about Oslo, you're very likely to get noticed and featured on the home page. Or, if you do post about Oslo or find something Olso-related that you think deserves mention and we haven't found it yet, then don't hesitate to tell us! Finally, if that doesn't make you happy, you should feel free to send your email directly to the site's editors, Chris Sells and Kent Sharkey. We're here for you!

What is "Oslo?"

And to kick this conversation off, we'd like to provide the 10,000 foot introduction to "Oslo". "Oslo" is the code name for our platform for model-driven applications. The goal of "Oslo" is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream. At the core of this platform are domain-specific models, language and tools:

Together, these components will make it more efficient for a team to develop, implement, and maintain applications and services.

What is "M"?

"M" is a new declarative language that provides developers with an approachable, textual format for authoring models and DSLs for those models. The "M" language consists of three parts: MGraph, MSchema and MGrammar. MGraph is used to write down values in a graph structure similar to syntaxes like JSON. MSchema builds on MGraph by providing a structural type system, extent declarations for storing values, and computed values, which are queries over values and extents. MGrammar is used to describe a domain-specific language in terms of token and syntax rules, which are then used to parse text into an MGraph.

What is "Quadrant"?

Quadrant is a real-time editor over a SQL database. Updates in Quadrant are automatically propagated to the database. Views over the same data are automatically refreshed when those data changes are made to the database. This is technically possible because Quadrant is built on an innovative dataflow technology. Quadrant's user experience is reflective of the experience in Office tools.

Quadrant is available to PDC attendees on the VPC, but not yet available for download. We hope to get Quadrant into a future Oslo CTP soon!

What is the Repository?

The "Oslo" repository delivers a platform to manage application metadata. The "Oslo" repository provides a common set of features to enable data-driven applications to leverage a platform investment made by Microsoft.

The "Oslo" repository builds naturally upon the SQL Server database and provides optimizations for storing and sharing models – by providing a thin layer on top of the existing DBMS engine, this enables customers to easily leverage the existing SQL Server database ecosystem (e.g. tools, reporting, BI, etc). The repository is designed for extensibility, and supports common tasks such as impact analysis and access control. The repository manages end-to-end system models across the lifecycle, including support for both design and run-time views of application metadata. Pre-built models will be delivered as a starting point for building your full application, and with extensibility points so that your models can be augmented as needed.

Call to Action!

See for yourself. Download and install the Microsoft "Oslo" SDK. It contains lots of goodies, including:

And then, once you've dug through all of that, come here for more and to post your bugs and questions. We're working to keep the content up to date and fresh, so they'll always be something new for you at the Oslo DevCenter.

XXOO, Chris Sells & Kent Sharkey

0 comments



No older posts       No newer posts