Matthew Wilson is pushing "M" into the land of browser client-side scripting with his partial (but growing!) JavaScript implementation, as seen in his web 3-pane “M” grammar mode ala Intellipad. It's work like this that could make "M" a cross-platform solution for languages as well as data types and values. Good job, Matt!

Keith and Woody speak with the first repeat guest of the podcast, Shawn Wildermuth about Oslo and the M language.  In this episode listeners will get some real world examples and use cases for using Oslo and M along with a clearer understanding about DSLs and what the future may hold.

Be warned, this podcast uses the phrase “bowled shrimp.” : )

If you want to display “M” languages or values, Ceyhun Ciper from sixpairs.com has got you covered with the MGraph Object Model Display Library for WPF. It’s as simple as this:

Canvas canvas = new ObjectModel().Display(
  "Person {Name=>'Ciper', 47, 'sixpairs\n.com'}");

Sweet!

Dana Kaufman, a PM on the extended "Oslo" team, has been blogging a series of articles on the definition of a set of “M” types, the associated “M” language definition for a domain-specific language (DSL) and concluding in how that data can be visualized and manipulated in "Quadrant" (the first two parts are available now and the third is coming). Enjoy!

Do you like Intellipad so much that you want to host it? If so, than you need Actipro’s SyntaxEditor, which is not only a kick-butt syntax highlighting editor, but can be completely driven by an "Oslo" language definition in a .mg file. The demo is free and one of the samples is a fun little Intellipad clone. Check it out!

I love our customers. They do things like take our bits and produce MGDisplay, a tool written by Ceyhun Ciper for visualizing the parse tree produced by parsing a DSL instance document with a “M” language definition. Enjoy!

Jeff Pinkston, the lead program manager on the “M” languages team has some questions that he’d love your feedback on:

• How do you think about “M” inter-operating with XML? XSD? Other data formats?
• Given that OO languages are nominally typed and “M” is structurally typed, what is the purpose of a type? How do you think about it?

The “Oslo” team is just at the beginning of our last real milestone before the PDC in November, so the answers to these questions help us to decide how to spend our time. I know that it seems like Microsoft has the ability to crank out the great works of Shakespeare, but we’re limited by time and resources, too, so if you have an opinion on these questions, drop by Pinky’s place and let him know what you think. Or, if you’ve got other suggestions about how to improve “Oslo”, drop them into our suggestion box!

I’ll be speaking at the Portland Code Camp on Saturday, May 30th, just as the May CTP of “Oslo” is hot off the presses:

As you may or may not know, “Oslo” is also a place. However, we’re not going to talk about that. Instead, Chris Sells, a member of the technical staff on the Microsoft “Oslo” team, is going to give you a quick intro to “Oslo,” including “M” and Quadrant, taking you end-to-end on a few real-world-ish examples and then wave his hands furiously about the rest, begging you to give it a try and complain loudly and often so we can get it right before we ship v1.0.

Come one, come all! Bring a friend and get a free GUID!