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.

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!

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?

Lars Corneliussen, my friend and “Oslo” consigliere, has posted a nice update on what he’s guessing “Oslo” might or might not be: Updates on what Oslo is and Quadrant not is (September 2009). The fact that he has to guess points to just how early we are in the development cycle. For our latest thoughts, I recommend the PDC 2009, where you should attend all of the following talks:

• Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer, Don Box, Chris Anderson
• Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in .NET 4 and Beyond, Shyam Pather, Chris Anderson
• ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework, Pablo Castro
• Building Data-Driven Applications Using Microsoft Project Code Name “Quadrant” and Microsoft Project Code Name “M”, Douglas Purdy, Chris Sells
• Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language, Jeff Pinkston, Don Box
• Microsoft Project Code Name “Repository”: Using Metadata to Drive Application Design, Development, and Management, Shoshanna Budzianowski, James Baker
• The ‘M’-Based System.Identity Model for Accessing Directory Services, Gert Drapers, Kim Cameron

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to this PDC. I get to give what I’m sure is the talk with the longest title, but even better, I get to see friends, old and new, and I love listening to good talks on technologies I just don’t have the time to dive into any other time.

If you’re going to PDC and you’d like to chat, drop me a line and we can set up some time. See you there!

And the folks in Scottsdale, AZ lined up overnight to be there when it opened and get their copies of Windows 7 (which goes on sale today and, if I may say so, rocks).

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'... : )

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!

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!