Hello again from Chris and Kent, your editors on the “Oslo” Developer Center. On Friday, January 30^th, 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

Bill Gibson is an architect on the Oslo team and is in charge of our M coding conventions and modeling patterns documents. He’s started blogging recently and has a nice post about domain modeling in Oslo. He’s a good guy to hit up with questions about how to model various constructs in M or just modeling questions in general. He’s been doing this modeling thing forever…

Holy cow — another Oslo course, this one from Agilitrain:

“Microsoft’s Oslo is trying to change the way that software is designed, developed and delivered. They are introducing a platform for building real, scalable and manageable model-driven applications. Being an early adopter of this platform will prepare you for our changing world.

“This course will show you how to build models and domain specific languages and use them all at runtime using the Repository to create great applications for your users.”

I’m a huge Shawn Wildermuth fan (Shawn’s the author of this course and the instructor). Recommended.

Rocky makes some good points in his recent piece on DSLs (DSLs — fun, cool, but maybe a bad idea? ) — basically, who’s going to learn the DSL when the folks that know it move on? That’s one potential downside of the proliferation of DSLs and I could give you more.

However, all technologies come with these downsides, e.g.

• Managed environments make new programmers forget what’s under the hood (and in some cases, actually afraid to look).
• Horseless carriages produce pollution.
• iPhones are killing the English language by encouraging the use of “words” like “lol,” “afaik” and “wtf.”
• Airplanes crash.
• Very very bad code written in Visual Basic can still do the right thing.
• Fonts let every letter look like a ransom note.
• etc.

The point isn’t whether a technology has downsides or not — of course, it does. The point is whether the upsides outweigh the downsides. In the case of DSLs and model-driven development all up, the “Oslo” team is making a big bet that we can make you overall more productive when digging ourselves out of the IT software backlog hole. Will we be? I think so, but we have a lot of work to do before we’ll know for sure.

And how do we reduce the impact of the downsides of a new technology? By knowing that they’re there, which is why Rocky’s commentary is so useful. Recommended.

nearly 40 years old; past his youth!
But tonight with a smile,
he swam non-stop for a mile.
First time in his life - that’s the truth!

I swam a mile when I was 17 and again last summer, but never non-stop before. I know it doesn’t compare to real swimmers (it took me 45 minutes), but I’ve been swimming for less than a year. Plus i found two meaningful rhymes for “Duluth.“ I rock. : )

Episode 123 of Software Engineering Radio is all about Oslo:

“In this episode we discuss Microsoft’s OSLO platform with Doug Purdy and Don Box. We briefly discuss what OSLO is in general and then look at the various components of OSLO. We also look at how OSLO fits in with the general Microsoft strategy and how it compares to other DSL/Model-driven approaches. We then look at language modularization and composition and discuss the similarities with XML and Smalltalk. Finally, we discuss possible integrations of OSLO with other MD* approaches and technologies.”

Enjoy.