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