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!

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!

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…

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.

DSL Developers Conference
applied topics in domain specific languages

April 16-17, 2009, Microsoft Campus, Redmond, WA

 

Spirit of the Developer’s Conference

The goal of the DSL Developer’s Conference is to cut away all the unessential conference baggage and concentrate on why we’re spending time at a conference in the first place — the talks by industry experts and experienced practitioners. By doing so, we can keep your wasted time to a minimum. In fact, if you don’t go away with your head hurting from all the new ideas you’ve heard, we’ve haven’t done our job!

Summary

What	2 days of practical, applied DSL sessions from industry experts and practitioners
When	April 16th, 1pm-6pm (registration at noon), April 17th, 9am-6pm
Where	Microsoft Research Building 99, Room 1919 14820 NE 36th Street Redmond, WA 98052 USA (on the other side of 520 from main campus) If you’re flying, you want to target the Seattle-Tacoma Int’l Airport (SEA).
Cost	$0 for 1.5 days of sessions (half the bargain at twice the cost!)

Sadly, It’s Over

But you can see the videos and download the slides here!

There were countless blog posts and tweets.

Fabulous conference, folks. Best DevCon ever!

Site

This site, and all its contents, are copyright © 2001-2009, Chris Sells and Microsoft, Corp. All rights reserved. Please contact csells@microsoft.com with any comments or suggestions.

Our own Paul Vick is on CodeCast: The Late Night Show for .NET Developers, with your hosts Ken Levy, Gary Short, and Markus Egger. Enjoy!

All my friends have updated to Windows 7. My 14-year old son is running Win7. I’m the only one I know that’s not running Windows 7. The reason? Windows 7 took away a feature I use all the time, as shown on the right: Search the Internet.

Here’s what I do all day, every day in Vista: Ctrl+Esc to bring up the Start menu, then I start typing. If I’m searching on my HD, I immediately get matches and I can choose one with just the arrows and the Enter key. If I’m typing in the name of a program in the Start menu, I get those matches and choose one. If I want “calc” or “notepad” I can just type those and those work.

However, 80% of the time, I want to search the internet, so enter my search term, optionally including attributes like “site:”, I press, down-arrow once, highlight “Search the Internet” and press Enter. This brings up my default browser with my search results in my default search engine without me having to move the mouse or open the browser and wait for the home page or even decide where I want the search results to come from until after I’ve entered my search phrase.

And they took it out of Windows 7. : (

I logged the bug and heard nothing.

Does anyone know of I 3rd party program I can run that will work exactly like the Vista Start menu under Windows 7? Please?

At the last DevCon in 2003, blogging was rampant. We had about 100 posts in the lead up to the conference and during the conference itself.

A this year’s DSL DevCon, there’s a ton of buzz, but almost none of it is in the blogosphere. Instead, it’s all in Twitter.Last I checked, it was more than 150 tweets and we’re still on the first talk of the 2nd day (and day #1 was only a half day).

The worm has turned.