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.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Very much worth the read. Enjoy.

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.

Lars Corneliussen has a fun post entitled Microsoft “Oslo” MGraph - the next XML? He concludes by comparing JSON, XML and MGraph to represent the same data:

• JSON: 661 characters
• XML: 1065 characters
• MGraph: 590 characters

Enjoy.

I’m giving two talks on model-driven development at VSone in Germany in Feb this year: the keynote and a dive into Oslo. If you’re in the neighborhood or are looking for a party spot, drop on by!

I’m even going for an extra few days to see the sights — hopefully it won’t be too cold. I’m from the Midwest and all, but when it’s cold there, we stay home. I want to go out! Any suggestions for what I should oughta see?

Kristofer Andersson is designing and implementing an airline reservation in the open air. In the process, he ported his models to M, but not by writing them by hand, but by writing a tool to convert existing SQL schema to M. Enjoy.