Spork is a sample of an end-to-end application using M and the Repository. It starts by defining a set of M types that describe the data needed for a text adventure along the lines of the famous Infocom game Zork (and hence the corporate bad-café-inspired name). The M instances are generated by running a custom compiler developed with the VBA (Visual Basic for Adventures) MGrammar grammar. We also provide a runtime driven by adventure data loaded into the Repository in multiple versions of the types called AdvRunner.

Follow along with the video or with the ReadMe see Spork in action. Enjoy!

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.

 

We think that’s a good way to make sure the conferences complement each other and helps keep people’s schedules sane and their travel costs lower. However, I have two questions for you:

 

1.      Traditionally, Lang.NET is 3 days and a DevCon is 2 days. Because of the overlap of the content (languages), we were wondering if folks thought it would be a good idea to do 2.5 days of Lang.NET and 1.5 days of DSL DevCon this year instead, doing both conferences in 4 days instead of 5. What do you think?

2.      If we linked these two events like this, will you attend just Lang.NET, just DSL DevCon or both?

 

Post your comments on this blog entry. Vote early, vote often!

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:

URL:

I love seeing Phil get trounced here, but the only thing that makes me wonder is, why is Dragomir so upset? I can’t help but gloat when I get to beat someone like that. : )

From Anne Dempsey, pokerlistings.com
Tue 12/16/2008 8:59 AM

Markus Völter has posted some interesting model-driven design guidelines, my favorite of which is "notation, notation, notation!" Since Of course, since Oslo provides MGrammar to let you build the notation of your choice, I'm hardly unbiased. : )

COM spread the love between developers of multiple languages.

Oslo spreads the love between domain experts, developers and IT folks.

Check out show #401 of .NET Rocks for the how and the why. Enjoy.

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.”

Did I mention I’m doing the voices, too?

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.

For a demonstration (and an explanation of how to get MScriptMode working in Intellipad), Spanky has recorded a very nice Mr. Epl screencast. Highly recommended.

Secondly, Spanky has just released a library for taking the output of MGrammar and producing a graph of .NET objects via XAML. He’s got a nice screencast of using it to create something simple to give you a feel, then he moves right into a natural language processor for creating WPF windows and controls interactively. The ability to type text that translated into WPF without using angle brackets demonstrates the potential for DSLs very well, I think.

A few notes when watching Spanky’s screencasts:

• He has slowed himself down considerably to be clear and understandable and he’s done a good job. If you’d like to hear what he sounds like in real life, run the screencast at 1.5x speed. : )
• He has a blinking red/green light in the taskbar — what *is* that?!
• He’s a dev that tells a story like a champ — why the hell does my team even need PMs?

Anyone interested in Oslo should absolutely subscribe to Spanky’s blog. I know I have.

Justin Bailey shows how to hook up custom syntax highlighting in Intellipad for your MGrammar language. Very cool!