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!

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!

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!

Last year right after the 4th of July, one of my kind readers offered to let the me and the boys help set up and set off this year's 4th of July show in or around Portland. However, I can't find who offered. If that kind reader is still out there, can you drop me a line? I'm sure my 60-year-old father would like to help, too. Thanks!

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!

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!

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!

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!