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.
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009, 5:22 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Chris Sells on .NET Rocks! talking about data
I was on .NET Rocks! recently talking to Richard and Carl about data in Visual Studio (object-oriented, XML and relational), what tools Microsoft is already providing for managing your SQL Server schema and data migration and where "Oslo" ("M", "Quadrant" and the Repository) fits into the overall picture. It was fun and I think it turned out well. Enjoy.
Monday, Nov 2, 2009, 11:22 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Questionnaire DSL with Microsoft "Oslo"
Gerben van Loon, a lead developer at Avanade, has put together a nice overview of a DSL they've been building for describing questionnaires in "M", seeing how they flow in Quadrant and then executing them on their web site. Sweet stuff!
Friday, Oct 30, 2009, 8:09 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Sweet State Machine DSL in "M"
Kevin D. Wolf has built a sweet little language to describe state machines:
The States of a Invoice are New, Reviewed, Submitted, Paid, Overdue and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from New to Reviewed and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from Reviewed to Submitted and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from Submitted to Paid, Overdue and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from Overdue to Paid and Canceled.
He built this with a language definition in "M". What could be simpler?
Sunday, Oct 11, 2009, 3:41 PM in Oslo Featured Content
"M" Language Type Definitions for 280 Popular (and not so popular) Data Models
Holy "M" types, Batman! Somebody's been busy building M type definitions for tons of existing data models, including ATOM, AWK, BPEL, C/C++/C#/Java, COBOL, HTML, LaTeX, Make and the list goes on and on. I don't know how they did it -- it's an amazing task! Now that they've got some free time back, maybe they'll build M language definitions to parse the file formats. I'm just sayin'... : )
Thursday, Sep 24, 2009, 11:15 AM in Oslo Featured Content
NHibernate DSL Built Using "Oslo"
Felice has built a domain specific language (DSL) for defining NHibernate entities using "Oslo", including both a command-line compiler and a very full-featured Intellipad add-in. Nice!
Friday, Sep 18, 2009, 5:15 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Put Intellipad-like language editing features into your applications
Bill Henning from Actipro Software has done it again, this time providing the components to drop real-time language creation features into your application for building custom grammars in the critically acclaimed SyntaxEditor control. Enjoy!
Tuesday, Sep 8, 2009, 11:50 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Kraig Brockschmidt blogging on "Oslo"
Kraig Brockschmidt, the author of calc.exe and the famous (and infamous : ) "Inside OLE," has been a part of the "Oslo" community team for a while and is now blogging in the way that only he can. He's building some samples as he explores the feet on the ground experience and you should check it out. Enjoy!
Wednesday, Sep 2, 2009, 10:56 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Amanda Laucher on Using Oslo for DSLs
Amanda Laucher talks about Oslo and its tools, Intellipad, m.exe and mg.exe - the "M" compilers - and how they can be used to create a DSL. She demonstrates the creation of a demo DSL in Oslo, and she does it in a very approachable way. [ed: Quadrant is available with the May CTP.]
Friday, Jul 24, 2009, 7:59 AM in Oslo Featured Content
SQL Script to Uninstall an "M" Image
"In the May CTP bits, we started working on parts of uninstall support for schema created by an image, but didn’t expose it as a user-visible feature as we will in future CTPs. So if you want to get your hands on this functionality right now, give this SQL script a try. This creates a stored procedure creatively named 'Uninstall,' which takes one argument, the id of the image to uninstall which can be obtained from the [Language.Catalog.Runtime].[Images] table."
Friday, Jul 10, 2009, 1:13 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Modeling Inheritance in "M"
Dave Langer, an architect at Microsoft, explores the question of how to model inheritance in "M". What do you think? What support for inheritance should "Oslo" provide? What scenarios do you need us to nail in this area? Let us know!
Friday, Jul 10, 2009, 8:09 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Use the "Oslo" Repository to Store Service Config
Mikael Håkansson has built a WCF ServiceHostFactory to load service configurations from the "Oslo" Repository, which allows you to configure your services with "Quadrant". And he does it even though the Service.ServiceModel type that has been removed from the May CTP (Keith Short talks about why). Check it out!
Thursday, Jul 9, 2009, 8:13 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Telerik Ships Alpha "M"-Based Comparison Tool
Imagine you've shipped v1 of your database applications against a schema created from "M". Now, you're about to ship the v2 of your database, but what about the v1 clients? Are the tables and views exposed from your database backward compatible or are you going to break those existing clients? How do you even find out?
Well, wonder no more! Telerik has shipped the alpha of their "Oslo" comparison tool, which can compare v1 of your "M" source code against v2 to see what's changed and whether that's going to break your v1 clients. And as if that weren't enough, they're working on another version of the tool that will create scripts so that you can migrate your v1 data to v2 after you're satisfied that your v1 clients will continue to work.
And the best part? It's all free! Download yours today.
Wednesday, Jul 8, 2009, 5:13 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Telerik Does LINQ to "M"
Stephen Forte and Mehfuz (who, like Prince and Cher, needs no last name), have built LINQ to "M", which means that if you've got "M" source code like this (shown in a C# string variable for loading convenience):
string MGraphCode =
@"{{Name=""Stephen Forte"", Age=37}, ... }";
and a C# type like this:
public class Person {
public string Name { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
}
then you can load the "M" source and run LINQ queries against it:
var persons =
QueryContext.Instance.Load<Person>(MGraphCode);
var result =
from person in persons
where person.Age == 37 &&
person.Name == "Stephen Forte"
orderby person.Name ascending
select person;
Enjoy!
Tuesday, Jul 7, 2009, 4:09 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Part 3 of Dana's End-to-End "Oslo" Series: Quadrant
In part 1 and part 2 of his series, Dana Kaufman, a Program Manager on the "Oslo" team, used "M" to model the schema for employee information and to create a domain-specific language (DSL) for creating values of that schema. In part 3, Dana shows how to navigate the schema and models in "Quadrant," the data visualization and manipulation tool of "Oslo." Enjoy!
Monday, Jul 6, 2009, 1:07 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Rocky's MCsla on the Olso May CTP
Rockford Lhotka of several C# and VB books and the world-renown CSLA .NET business object framework has ported his "Oslo"-based MCsla.NET to the May 2009 CTP. For the part that he's made work in "Oslo," Rocky has told me that the amount of code you need to write to take advantage of his framework is down by 90% over the C#/VB.NET versions, which sounds like a pretty big win to me. Enjoy!