Oslo
Gosh, it’s been six months since I’ve said anything on this blog. I was beginning to wonder myself whether I’d ever come back or if this just would become yet another decaying corner of the Internet… Anyway, things have been quiet around here for several reasons. First, there’s just been a lot going on in my world, and blogging (and tweeting and facebooking) has been pretty low on the priority list. None of it is worth broadcasting to the entire world on the Internet, but suffice it to say that it’s been a very heavy year. Second, I...
In case you missed it, we pushed out a new CTP this week of “Oslo”. You can get it at the Oslo Developer Center. New stuff includes: The "Quadrant" modeling tool. Use Quadrant to browse and edit models in a repository database. Domain models for the UML 2.1 specification encompassing Use Case, Activity, Class, Sequence, Component diagrams, profiles and templates. An XMI importer supporting the 2.1 specifications, and covering the diagrams identified above. A domain model and loader for System.Runtime. There...
Things have been a bit quiet around Panopticon Central lately due to the fact that I’ve been heads down on developing a particularly gnarly feature in M. More on that if and when it starts to see the light of day. But in the mean time, there have been a few interviews/talks that have been posted that I wanted to point out: I did a Code Cast interview with Ken Levy in which I talked about M, VB and apparently gave out the wrong address for this blog! I gave a talk with...
Another “in case you missed it,” there’ll be some new information about “M” revealed at Mix09. More details on Doug’s blog…
I want to talk in more detail about how the MGrammar parser works, but before I delve too deeply in to that I wanted to talk a little bit about some basic parsing concepts so we can be sure we’re on the same page. This may be a bit basic for some, so you can just skip ahead if you already know all this.
A language grammar is actually made up of two different grammars: a lexical grammar and a syntatic grammar. Although a grammar may not distinguish between the two in its specification (as we’ll see later), every grammar has...
One of the major reasons that I decided to come to work on the Oslo team was the experience I had with what was going to become MGrammar. I was interested in prototyping some language and compiler design ideas, and I knew that the Oslo team had some technologies that might help me out, specifically a parser generator. They helpfully pointed me to their source code, I enlisted, built and started to play around. I’d been building some parser technology by hand, but I quickly discarded it once I started playing around with MGrammar in Intellipad. In addition to giving...
As some readers have noticed, I’ve been conspicuously silent since I moved over to the Oslo team. Some of this had to do with getting onto a new blogging engine, some of it had to do with various distractions like jury duty, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that Visual Basic 10.0 has gotten to a pretty stable state (so there isn’t so much for me to say any more) and I am just getting off the ground with Oslo. Not having much useful to say, I figured I’d be better off saying nothing at...
Now that we’re past the PDC, there are a bunch of video resources coming out on VB 10.0 and Oslo. Here’s a roundup of what’s available so far: Channel9 has a video that I did with Don and Chris on M called, “Don Box, Paul Vick, and Chris Anderson: Introducing M” Channel9 also has a video Don and Chris did on their own covering Oslo, “Don and Chris explain Oslo in 5 minutes” The Pearson folks also recorded some vidcasts they call OnMicrosoft. If you go to the previous link, you can see all the videos posted, but the...
The Oslo dev center on MSDN is now up, and the Oslo CTP is available. You can also check out Models Remixed for even more information and keep your eye on the M language blog. More to be revealed tomorrow…
Full Oslo Archive