If you weren’t lucky enough to be able to attend this year’s PDC, not only did you not get a killer laptop, but you didn’t get to see the Data & Modeling talks live and in person. Fortunately, Doug has a nice list of them so you can watch them from the comfort of your own home. Enjoy!

Doug Purdy shows off three features of “Quadrant” from the Nov ’09 SQL Server Modeling CTP bits in two minutes:

• Access to SQL Azure databases
• Creating custom views (including master detail) by mashing views together
• See the “markup” of any view in Quadrant and steal it/change it (just like view source in a Web browser)

The boys and I were driving past a church with a holiday bizarre, so we stopped by. It was a mix of silent auction, bake sale and a $1 raffle for a turkey dinner with all the fixings. I made several comments about how they could skip the formality of the drawing and to make sure they could read my phone number on the back of my raffle ticket, because I was obviously going to win. They laughed.

When they called this morning to let me know that I had won, they told me that they remembered me and I laughed.

I couldn’t wait for the PDC, so I posted a screen shot of my favorite new three features of “M” for defining domain-specific languages (DSLs) in the November 2009 CTP of “Oslo”:

• Expressions on the right-hand side in language actions to calculate results. “M” supports a rich expression syntax for a variety of data types.

• Data conversion functions for output, one for each of the supported “M” data types.

• DSL debugging mode to let you step through your input data and debug your language.

In the November 2009 CTP of “Oslo”, we’ve got some new DSL features in “M”, three of which I couldn’t wait for the PDC to brag about.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Doug Purdy, my boss and one of the chiefs on the “Oslo” project has just announced the move from codename “Oslo” to SQL Server Modeling, which is the name we’ll be using for starting now for the group of “M”, “Quadrant” and Repository that you’ve come to know and love.

I was on .NET Rocks! recently talking to Richard and Carl about data in Visual Studio (object-oriented, XML

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!