Leave it to Savas to invent a self-modifying DSL in MGrammar. You go, Savas! : )

The “Oslo” team heard you! There was some “regression in the quality of the bits” in the Jan CTP from the PDC CTP that affected you guys in our 3-pane mode for grammar editing in Intellipad (aka the bits are worse than they used to be). It was just a sample, but it’s so so useful, that language developers are using the hell out of it, which means they’re running into “performance and robustness issues” (which means it was slow and crashed) and we’ve fixed the worst ones in the January 2009 “Oslo” SDK Refresh.

You have to uninstall the three things that are called “Oslo” before you install and there are no new features or other changes — this is just to make the 3-pane mode better.

Please bang on it, ask your questions and report your issues. Thanks!

Oh, and 3-pane mode will be an official part of the product in future CTPs, so it will receive the same testing love as the rest of the project. We heard you!

Doug Purdy and I will be giving an “M” talk about web stuff at this year’s Mix:

Learn how Web developers can use “M”, a new language for describing data, metadata and domain specific languages, to enhance RESTful services like HTTP, JSON, RSS/Atom, and more. Also see how “M” can be used on premise or in the cloud to achieve greater development productivity and to create more compelling customer experiences.

Come one, come all!

Martin, who has recently agreed to be the keynote speaker for the DSL DevCon, has a nice piece on DSL migration strategies.

While Oslo has no direct support for the incremental migration strategy to migrate DSL documents forward, we absolutely provide the tools for building it yourself. We do have very nice support for model-based migration, which keeps a parser around for each version of the DSL and produces the same underlying semantic model (which we call MGraph).

Stephen has three more installments in his series on modeling an application in Oslo: Discovery, Domain Entities and Refactoring and Transforming MGraph to TSQL. It's fascinating to watch him use the platform starting from scratch. Recommended!

Stephen’s been turning himself into an Oslo programmer:

″Telerik is building some cool Oslo utilities and I am in the middle of designing them. As I was talking to Chris about some of the specs the other day, he asked me: “What are you using to keep track of the metadata of your application in your design process?” I was like: “Pen, paper, whiteboard, Word and Excel.” He said why are you not using Oslo? Then it struck me, I was in .NET programmer mode. So last decade. While I am using Visual Studio 2008, WPF, SQL Server 2008 and the Oslo SDK to build an application for Oslo, I was not using Oslo to help build the application.”

Worth watching.

Hello again from Chris and Kent, your editors on the “Oslo” Developer Center. On Friday, January 30^th, we released the January 2009 CTP of the “Oslo” SDK. This release was primarily a quality release, but we’ve also added some new features (which you can read about in the release notes). My favorite of these is token actions, which lets me do things like specify a string in a .mg file but pull out the guts without keeping the double quotes that surround it:

token String = Word | a:‘“’ s:(‘“”’ | ^‘“’)+ b:‘“’ => s;

If you’re building grammars, you know why this is cool and if you’re not, what are you waiting for?

Also, you’ll want to check out the new Modeling Patterns and Guidelines document where we start to explore common modeling tasks and how to approach them in M. This document will grow a great deal over time and if there’s some particular topic you’d like to see covered, drop us a line.

In the three short months since the PDC, we’ve tried to keep you up to date on fresh content from the team showing off how we think our customers will want to use or showing off features you might not have known about. The ones in this category I think will get you pointed in the right direction are “Oslo” Basics: Build Metadata-Based Applications With The “Oslo” Platform, Mr. EPL and Spork.

Also, “Oslo” has generated a ton of buzz in the community, including the forum, the connect bug database and in the blogosphere. The ones we think you should take particular note of are featured on the DevCenter as soon as we find them. Items I really think you should check out are Why Oslo is Important, MSchema and Decorator Tables and Creating a Logo/Turtle Graphics Textual DSL using Oslo MGrammar.

But wait, there’s more! If you’d really like some focused time on “Oslo,” there are not one but two training courses, one from Agilitrain and one from PluralSight.

Finally, if you’re an MGrammar fan, you’ll love the DSL DevCon, April 16 & 17 in Redmond, WA right after the Lang.NET conference.

Our goal on the DevCenter is bi-directional communication, so we’ve worked hard to make sure we keep our eyes open for all of the wonderful things you’re putting “Oslo” to use on. However, we’re only human, so if we miss something, whether it’s something you’ve built with “Oslo” or a question or piece of feedback, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Also, in case you don’t know what “Oslo” is or how to get started, you should check out the Getting Started section on the DevCenter home page.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

XXOO, Chris Sells & Kent Sharkey

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…