This year, we’re thinking very hard about putting the Lang.NET conference and the DSL DevCon at the same venue (the research center on the Microsoft Redmond campus) in the same week. The idea is that people interested in general-purpose language design and development can come to Lang.NET and the people interested in domain-specific languages can come to the DSL DevCon and for folks interested in both, the DSL DevCon will start right after Lang.NET, so folks can stay a little longer and come to both. Also, the conference chairs on both conferences will make sure to keep the content unique across the two conferences.
You may or may not know it, but I’m a big poker fan. For a while, I thought
about quitting my job and being a
Texas Holdem
poker player. I’ve studied a stack of poker books and every once in a while,
I get to be at a table when there’s a “moment” — somebody gets cocky and gets
beat in just the way they deserve. I’ve been the cocky guy and I’ve been the guy
that does the beating. Here’s an example with poker brat Phil Hellmuth of what
I’m talking about:
I’ve been writing my MSDN Magazine pieces introducing Oslo and spending a great deal of time in Mr. Epl mode inside Intellipad. So, at 1:23p on a Sundary afternoon, I’m getting a little loopy, which is manifesting itself as me repeating famous lines from popular culture, only substituting Mr. Epl’s name, e.g.
“Mr. Epl, I am your father.”
“Oh, Mr. Epl, I can’t pay the rent!” “You must pay the rent.” “I can’t pay the rent!”
“Help me, Mr. Epl. You’re my only hope!”
“Mr. Epl, Mr. Epl, it hurts when I do that!” “Don’t do that.”
SpankyJ (Josh Williams) is a star developer on the Oslo team (specifically the MSchema compiler) and he’s been doing some very cool stuff with M.
Firstly, Spanky’s the author of the Mr. Epl tool, which is a Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop program for interacting with M (M-REPL => Mr. Epl — cute, eh? When we used to call “M” “D”, it used to be Dr. Epl. If we change it to “S”, we’ll Senór Epl! : ). Mr. Epl ships with the Oslo SDK, so if you’ve installed it, you can find it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Oslo SDK 1.0\Bin\Intellipad\Samples\Microsoft.Intellipad.Scripting.M\MREPL.exe or you can execute it directly inside of Intellipad with the MScriptMode mode.
So, the other day, Windows XPSP2 destroyed my Windows Media Center Edition install that I’ve been using for years and absolutely loved. It let me record all my favorite shows on two separate tuners and I could watch them on the TV attached to my MCE box, from all the PCs in my house and from my XBOX 360. Losing it was a huge blow, especially since it was clear I’d need to repave and I was swamped with PDC and post-PDC work (damn those MSDN Magazine deadlines!).
