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, 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!
Monday, Jun 29, 2009, 2:38 PM in Oslo
MGraph Visualizer Plug-in for Intellipad!
Ceyhun Ciper is at it again, this time taking advantage of the Intellipad plug-in capabilities in the "Oslo" May 2009 CTP and adding real-time "M" visualization as you type. This is a wonderful way to see both the textual and graphic abstract symbol tree of your data as you type it. Keep up the good work, Ceyhun!
Wednesday, Jun 24, 2009, 9:43 AM in Oslo Featured Content
JavaScript implementation of "M"
Matthew Wilson is pushing "M" into the land of browser client-side scripting with his partial (but growing!) JavaScript implementation, as seen in his web 3-pane "M" grammar mode ala Intellipad. It's work like this that could make "M" a cross-platform solution for languages as well as data types and values. Good job, Matt!
Tuesday, Jun 23, 2009, 4:09 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Deep Fried Bytes: Shawn Wildermuth on "Oslo"
Keith and Woody speak with the first repeat guest of the podcast, Shawn Wildermuth about Oslo and the M language. In this episode listeners will get some real world examples and use cases for using Oslo and M along with a clearer understanding about DSLs and what the future may hold.
Be warned, this podcast uses the phrase "bowled shrimp." : )
Tuesday, Jun 23, 2009, 7:48 AM in Oslo
Need a visualization of "M" in your programs?
If you want to display "M" languages or values, Ceyhun Ciper from sixpairs.com has got you covered with the MGraph Object Model Display Library for WPF. It's as simple as this:
Canvas canvas = new ObjectModel().Display(
"Person {Name=>'Ciper', 47, 'sixpairs\n.com'}");
Sweet!
Tuesday, Jun 9, 2009, 11:37 AM in Oslo Featured Content
From DSLs & Models to “Quadrant” w/ “Oslo” May CTP
Dana Kaufman, a PM on the extended "Oslo" team, has been blogging a series of articles on the definition of a set of "M" types, the associated "M" language definition for a domain-specific language (DSL) and concluding in how that data can be visualized and manipulated in "Quadrant" (the first two parts are available now and the third is coming). Enjoy!
Thursday, Jun 4, 2009, 5:43 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Actipro's SyntaxEditor Adds Support for "Oslo"!
Do you like Intellipad so much that you want to host it? If so, than you need Actipro's SyntaxEditor, which is not only a kick-butt syntax highlighting editor, but can be completely driven by an "Oslo" language definition in a .mg file. The demo is free and one of the samples is a fun little Intellipad clone. Check it out!
Friday, May 29, 2009, 8:39 AM in Oslo Featured Content
MGDisplay: Visualize Parsed "Oslo" Grammars
I love our customers. They do things like take our bits and produce MGDisplay, a tool written by Ceyhun Ciper for visualizing the parse tree produced by parsing a DSL instance document with a "M" language definition. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 28, 2009, 3:21 PM in Oslo Featured Content
Questions from Pinky on "Oslo"
Jeff Pinkston, the lead program manager on the "M" languages team has some questions that he'd love your feedback on:
- How do you think about "M" inter-operating with XML? XSD? Other data formats?
- Given that OO languages are nominally typed and "M" is structurally typed, what is the purpose of a type? How do you think about it?
The "Oslo" team is just at the beginning of our last real milestone before the PDC in November, so the answers to these questions help us to decide how to spend our time. I know that it seems like Microsoft has the ability to crank out the great works of Shakespeare, but we're limited by time and resources, too, so if you have an opinion on these questions, drop by Pinky's place and let him know what you think. Or, if you've got other suggestions about how to improve "Oslo", drop them into our suggestion box!
Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 5:08 PM in Oslo
"'Oslo', the May CTP and You" at the PDX Code Camp
I'll be speaking at the Portland Code Camp on Saturday, May 30th, just as the May CTP of "Oslo" is hot off the presses:
As you may or may not know, "Oslo" is also a place. However, we're not going to talk about that. Instead, Chris Sells, a member of the technical staff on the Microsoft "Oslo" team, is going to give you a quick intro to "Oslo," including "M" and Quadrant, taking you end-to-end on a few real-world-ish examples and then wave his hands furiously about the rest, begging you to give it a try and complain loudly and often so we can get it right before we ship v1.0.
Come one, come all! Bring a friend and get a free GUID!
Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 7:26 PM in Oslo
Oslo May 2009 CTP Available Now
The May 2009 CTP of "Oslo" available on the Developer Center contains a new unified setup, an Intellipad with an integrated DSL authoring mode, the UML domain and the CLR domain, a slimmed-down SDK with the samples and the documents available on the DevCenter, a unified tool set for the "M" language and, the one that folks have been most anticipating, Quadrant.
For more details about what's new, check out the letter from Kraig and Kent and the release notes. Also, in the coming weeks and months, Kraig and Kent have a pipeline of content for the DevCenter to keep you informed about how we're using "Oslo" and how you can use it better. If you've got suggestions, please use the Connect site and don't hesitate to post your questions on the forum.
Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 4:51 PM in Oslo
"Olso": Hot or Not?
A coupla weeks ago, I did two days with of meeting, greeting, talking and interviewing at a Dutch company in The Netherlands named Sioux. They do a conference with the politically incorrect name of “Hot or Not,” which includes an even more politically incorrect picture of two women as part of their advertising, one lovely and one… less so. They have done this conference 12 times before (I was lucky number 13, just like Bilbo) and the goal is to have someone known for a particular technology come and give a talk, e.g. Alan Cox on Linux, and then rate the technology as “Hot” or “Not.” Since they couldn’t get someone good for Oslo, they had to settle for me.
I spent day one having lunch with the Sioux engineers who were very insightful in their questions about how models fit into their process (all kinds of ways), how it works for embedded systems (XML generation), how it works across platforms (MSC and OSP, baby!), etc. After lunch, I had time to work on my demos and slides (whew) and play with a desktop electron microscope. We must’ve spent an hour looking through fly parts at 26,000 times magnification. They build seriously cool software at Sioux!
My “Oslo” talk was 2.5 hours long with a 30 minute cocktail break. I thought the Dutch were loud before the alcohol was served, but that was nothing… : ) There were 120 attendees in the room they’d set aside for me, and they’d turned away another 60 more that had wanted to come. I did Don Box and Doug Purdy’s “Lap Around Oslo” talk with a German twist (“this picture of the Fairytale Castle is a model, not the castle itself”), David Langworthy’s M talk (“let’s parse a simple sentence”) and showed off Spork, WIX, MUrl and MService. The audience’s questions were even more insightful, e.g. what about schema versioning? Why a new language? How do you debug a declarative language? Can I embed languages in each other? What if I want to use an M language without a database at all?
At the end, I was awarded a book on Dutch culture (very useful! Now I know why the bicycles throw themselves in front of my car and why it wasn’t such a big deal as I thought for me to have to drive up on the sidewalk a little…). And then, without so much as a courtesy screen, the vote was called right in front of me – thumbs up, Oslo “hot” or “not?” I was to learn later that this is a serious thing – they’ve rated at least one technology as only 30% hot.
Luckily for my pride and my continued employment, Oslo was rated 98% hot. That made the magazine interviewing the next day much less embarrassing I’ll tell you!
Thursday, May 7, 2009, 12:08 PM in Oslo
James Clark Getting Involved in M
James Clark, the father of the world's fastest XML parser (according to his bio) is helping us with M on the M Specification Community. He had some initial thoughts that I thought were interesting. I'm sooo glad he's keeping us honest!
Tuesday, May 5, 2009, 11:00 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Dutch "Computable" Interviews Chris Sells on Oslo
The translation from Dutch is pretty good: "The better you can describe applications in models, the less code you need to write and the more transparency you provide to developers and others." Computable spoke with Chris Sells. De programmamanager van de Connected Systems Divisie van Microsoft was in Nederland voor een Hot-or-Not lezing, georganiseerd door Sioux. The program manager of the Connected Systems Division of Microsoft in the Netherlands for a Hot-or-Not reading, organized by Sioux.
But they chose the strangest picture...
Sunday, May 3, 2009, 9:45 AM in Oslo Featured Content
Joel Spolsky talks about Wasabi: His FogBugz DSL
In Scott Hanselman's April 2009 podcast, Visiting Fog Creek Software and Joel Spolsky, Joel talks about Wasabi, FogCreek's VBScript compiler, and he talks about it really being a subset of VBScript used specifically for bringing FogBugz to Unix and the CLR. In fact, it's a VBScript compiler built specifically to compile a single application, doing things like making the 5% of ADO.NET they use cross-platform. And just in case the point isn't completely obvious, Joel and Scott draw the conclusion for us: Wasabi is the domain-specific language just for FogBugz. Just another DSL in nature.