Welcome to the “Oslo” Developer Center, your one-stop shop for all things “Oslo.” Do you need to learn how M works (or what the heck it is?)? Do you want to sprinkle some of that repository stuff into your SQL Server? Do you need a quick video tutorial on the “Oslo” SDK tools? Then you’ve come to the right place!

This DevCenter is a bi-directional communication channel between the “Oslo” product team and you, our customers. We have all kinds of things we want to tell you about Oslo and all manner of ways for us to tell it to you, e.g. articles, videos, screencasts, samples, tools, etc. But more important than that, we want to hear from you, so we’ve set up a forum for you to ask questions and a Connect site for you to report bugs. And, if you blog about Oslo, you’re very likely to get noticed and featured on the home page. Or, if you do post about Oslo or find something Olso-related that you think deserves mention and we haven’t found it yet, then don’t hesitate to tell us! Finally, if that doesn’t make you happy, you should feel free to send your email directly to the site’s editors, Chris Sells and Kent Sharkey. We’re here for you!

From the Pex site:

“Pex (Program EXploration) produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. … To do so, Pex performs a systematic white box program analysis. Pex learns the program behavior by monitoring execution traces, and uses a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component.” [ed: emphasis mine]

Yesterday, the ASP.NET team announced that they were going to ship jQuery, a small, populate open source web client library. And not only is Microsoft going to ship this library, as is, but we’re going to build support into Visual Studio for it, build future versions of our web components assuming it and support it via PSS like any other Microsoft product.

This is huge.

Do you want to know a tiny bit of what’s going to happen at this year’s PDC? Check these out:

• This is the Software + Services PDC: Mike Swanson
• By Developers, for Developers: Don Box and Chris Anderson
• Building Block Services, John Shewchuk
• Extending the Data Platform to the Cloud: Dave Campbell
• Amitabh Srivastava: Corporate Vice President of Cloud, Infrastructure, & Services

Joe Castro, a developer on the WPF product team, has written a very cool article about how to do custom chrome in your WPF applications

I’ve spent the last 3.5 years of my life working in various roles on a project that is now called “Oslo.” Both Don and Doug have posted definitions.

See you at the PDC!

I’ve always liked the Mac vs. PC ads. They’re clever, they make me laugh and I like both actors (Accepted is very under rated, IMO). Of course, I actually prefer my PC running Windows to a Macintosh (I had a Mac IIcx back in the day), I prefer Vista to XP and I’m a Microsoft employee, so I don’t have any trouble seeing the exaggeration, but there’s always a kernel of truth, which is what makes them funny. The part that kinda annoys me is that Apple seems to be claiming they have no such problems, which is, of course, not true.

The Mac vs. PC ads I understand: they’re meant to put down the PC by having the PC guy look like an idiot, leaving the Mac guy to seem non-threatening and therefore better by comparison.

Get ’em while they’re hot!