Gerben van Loon, a lead developer at Avanade, has put together a nice overview of a DSL they’ve been building for describing questionnaires in “M”, seeing how they flow in Quadrant and then executing them on their web site. Sweet stuff!

Kevin D. Wolf has built a sweet little language to describe state machines:

The States of a Invoice are New, Reviewed, Submitted, Paid, Overdue and Canceled.

An Invoice can transition from New to Reviewed and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from Reviewed to Submitted and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from Submitted to Paid, Overdue and Canceled.
An Invoice can transition from Overdue to Paid and Canceled.

He built this with a language definition in “M”. What could be simpler?

Holy "M" types, Batman! Somebody's been busy building M type definitions for tons of existing data models, including ATOM, AWK, BPEL, C/C++/C#/Java, COBOL, HTML, LaTeX, Make and the list goes on and on. I don't know how they did it -- it's an amazing task! Now that they've got some free time back, maybe they'll build M language definitions to parse the file formats. I'm just sayin'... : )

Felice has built a domain specific language (DSL) for defining NHibernate entities using “Oslo”, including both a command-line compiler and a very full-featured Intellipad add-in. Nice!

Bill Henning from Actipro Software has done it again, this time providing the components to drop real-time language creation features into your application for building custom grammars in the critically acclaimed SyntaxEditor control. Enjoy!

Kraig Brockschmidt, the author of calc.exe and the famous (and infamous : ) "Inside OLE," has been a part of the "Oslo" community team for a while and is now blogging in the way that only he can. He's building some samples as he explores the feet on the ground experience and you should check it out. Enjoy!

Amanda Laucher talks about Oslo and its tools, Intellipad, m.exe and mg.exe - the "M" compilers - and how they can be used to create a DSL. She demonstrates the creation of a demo DSL in Oslo, and she does it in a very approachable way. [ed: Quadrant is available with the May CTP.]

“In the May CTP bits, we started working on parts of uninstall support for schema created by an image, but didn’t expose it as a user-visible feature as we will in future CTPs. So if you want to get your hands on this functionality right now, give this SQL script a try. This creates a stored procedure creatively named ‘Uninstall,’ which takes one argument, the id of the image to uninstall which can be obtained from the [Language.Catalog.Runtime].[Images] table.”