Don Box's Spoutlet

Recent Oslo Stuff

don-box — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:48:00 GMT

A few things of note last week:

1. We put MURL out on the Oslo dev center. MURL is a textual DSL for doing web client work. ChrisAn and I showed an earlier version of this at the tail end of our PDC keynote last year. Kudos to Doug for driving it out the door and into people's hands.

2. We spent last week with James Clark in Redmond jamming on M. It was great getting a focused block of time to work on the language with a fresh set of (very bright) eyes.

3. Doug and Sells gave the M talk at Mix. I really want the MService stuff NOW!

Barbara Liskov wins Turing Award

don-box — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:33:00 GMT

Really really cool.

DSL DevCon

don-box — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:15:00 GMT

A couple of days ago, I spent some time with Chris Sells going over the proposed talks for DSL DevCon.

It was painful having to prune the talks down to 11 (in fact, I think we're wedging an extra one in to make it 12).

I'm sooo looking forward to this event.

Whither SOA Facts?

don-box — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:24:00 GMT

Say it isn't so!

The Encyclopedia of SOA has fallen off of the internet!

That or the site now requires a WS-Transfer-enabled web browser.

[edit: The site is back up. ]

Oslo Stuff

don-box — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:49:00 GMT

It's been a busy couple of months lately. Here're some things I've noticed since my last opportunity to blog.

Purdy is givng an Oslo talk at MiX. I've seen the demo he's working on and it's pretty interesting stuff. Sadly, I'm not going to be in Vegas to see him show it to people. He did the demo for the team today, but alas, I missed that too.

One M: MG.exe is dead. Nghi sent the checkin mail last Thursday that got us to a single compiler for M. As some folks know, the previous CTP's have had separate tool chains for the grammar compiler (MG.exe) and the schema/query compiler (M.exe). We now have a single compiler (M.exe), single MSBUILD task, and a single image format (*.mx). This is the first in a series of checkins between now and PDC 09 that get us to a single M language.

Intellipad performance. The team has really pushed on performance of Intellipad over the past few weeks. Both startup time and language-service enabled editing has gotten noticably faster. Add to this that every other day someone on the Intellipad hallway pulls me into their office for an aweome, jawdropping demo. Scary.

"Deferred" editing in Quadrant. In this milestone, we're supporting an editing model in which you can accumulate changes over a long period of time (days) and submit them en masse to the target store. Ah, the wonders of optimistic concurrency...

The M Catalog. Another big work item this milestone is that we've schematized the results of compilation (in M of course) and have wired the tool chain up to populate the catalog when you load an M module. This gives us an M-oriented dataset that you can use to query what M definitions have been installed in a given context, as well as a place to hang your annotations/attributes off of. Ah, the wonders of the relational model...

I'm giving an Oslo talk at TechEd in May. It's in LA this year - good times.

Fresh Oslo Bits

don-box — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:32:00 GMT

The team just shipped the January CTP bits of Oslo.

My favorite new feature is that token rules can now specify right-hand-sides just like syntax rules.

Consuming MGrammar output from C#

don-box — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:51:00 GMT

An MGrammar language is effectively a function from Unicode text to an arbitrary MGraph value.

Our runtime provides a fairly low-level mechanism for consuming (and constructing) MGraphs (IGraphBuilder), but it's a very wonky interface that is tuned for some pretty low-level usage (effectively for consumption by other runtime stacks).

Josh Williams (SpankyJ) and John Doty had built out an IGraphBuilder implementation that constructs XAML using some pretty straightforward rules. We couldn't get it into the PDC bits, but we were able to get it out as a sample.

See Spanky's blog entry on how to get it an use it.

Personally, this is the way I want to consume M values when I write C#.

This is even more true once we open up right-hand-sides of rules to more (hopefully all) of the M language.

MrEPL: REPL for M

don-box — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Another Spanky gem.

Note that the PDC bits expose both the parsed and typechecked forms of an M module, so you can produce or consume M from the .NET language of your choice.

MrEPL is a fun exploitation of this capability...

Small Basic

don-box — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:45:00 GMT

My Oslo colleage Vijaye Raji has a passion around getting young people interested in programming.

During his not-so-copious free time, he wrote a self-contained BASIC environment to let people write little programs that do a lot.

Today, that tool got a public home on the just-launched DevLabs site.

Go Super Ninja!

Talks I want to see @ PDC

don-box — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:17:00 GMT

In looking at the agenda for the event, here are some talks I'd really love to crash:

Oslo: Building Textual DSLs - lots of geek porn appeal, and if internal usage is any indication, a highly addictive technology. I predict this will be the World of Warcraft of 2009.
Intro to F# - I spent a month living in F# early this year and had a great time. I'm dying to hear how Luca has made the leap from OO to functional programming.
ASP.NET and jQuery - OK, so the title on the details page doesn't match, but if this is a session on how MS is going to integrate jQuery into the arsenal of .NET devs, I want to hear it.
The Raymond Chen talk - Despite being a former columnist for MSDN Magazine (hi Joel), I like unmanaged code too and would love to see what we're doing in the land of HWNDs.
Steve Marx codes - If you want us to run your code in our cloud, go see this talk. Period.
Vasters on messaging services - If you want to run your code at your place but want us to help wire it up to the rest of the world, go see this talk. Period.
Dharma - to hear Dharma talk about his work is always refreshing, and the stuff he's been doing is pretty compelling.
The New XAML Stack - We're getting a XAML stack in .NET 4.0 that spans all of our technologies. No more XOML!
The UAC talk - OK, call me selfish, but I really want everyone to write apps that work for standard user accounts. Nothing would please me more than if we had to repeat this talk 3 times due to overflow problems in the room.
Miguel in blue - no longer relegated to ad hoc hallway presentations or using nearby hotel rooms, Miguel is donning a standard issue blue Microsoft speaker shirt, applying the Silverfox powerpoint template, upgrading his laptop to Windows 7, and giving a sanctioned PDC talk that even Richard Klees would approve of. OK, so I'm sure one or two of those statements isn't true, but I need to see it with my own eyes.

Paul Vick relocates to Oslo

don-box — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:54:00 GMT

Paul just joined my team to work on the Oslo language, specifically the parts covered in this talk.

I can't put into words how happy I am that Paul signed up to help us birth this baby.

Schlimmerblog

don-box — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:20:00 GMT

I just noticed that JeffSch started blogging again - he was at the VSX conference this week (conveniently right across the street from our building).

Go check it out.

eWeek piece on Oslo

don-box — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:13:00 GMT

Darryl Taft has written the best piece I've seen on oslo so far.

Bonus points to Darryl for being the first press person to get BradLo to talk :-)

Another Oslo talk

don-box — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:44:00 GMT

ChrisAn and GioDL's talk just got published this morning:

"Oslo": Building Textual DSLs

The "Oslo" modeling language can define schemas and transformations over arbitrary text formats. This session shows you how to build your own Domain Specific Language using the "Oslo" SDK and how to apply your DSL to create an interactive text editing experience.

With this one, the Oslo talks have all been published.

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) - now with source code!

don-box — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:12:00 GMT

Microsoft just shipped the MEF sources on codeplex.

It's fantastic to see the BradA's team getting this stuff into people's hands out-of-band with the big trains - very very nice.

Also cool is the fact that the source is there - I love this comment from Tuple.cs:

// NOTE : this is a TEMPORARY and a very minimalistic implementation of Tuple'2,
// as defined in http://devdiv/sites/docs/NetFX4/CLR/Specs/Base Class Libraries/Tuple Spec.docx
// We will remove this after we move to v4 and Tuple is actually in there

I love to see Tuple getting into the framework!