Jeffrey has a nice hands on intro to Oslo focusing on the Repository:

Oslo is Microsoft’s model-driven future. The Repository is one of the many architectural components debuting in the Oslo SDK. M is the Oslo model building language. M is translated to TSQL and the resulting Data Definitions create tables and views in the Oslo Repository.

Check it out!

I'm just catching up a little after one set of holidays and before another one on Wednesday and I noticed Erik Stepp’s blog post entitled “Oslo == 42” in my inbox. In his post, he provides a lovely discussion of what Oslo is and why we built it, giving us a concrete example from his own development life. He got it pretty much dead on. Check it out.

Dilip Krishnan has built a lovely little date parser that supports absolute dates like "6/2/1969" (just like DateTime.Parse already supports today) and relative dates like "today" or "next Monday" or "5 days from today". I find myself using relative date expressions like these all the time in Outlook and I've love to have them in every app I use that does dates. With Dilip's parser and the Oslo SDK, you can add it to your app. Good work, Dilip!

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!

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.