Oslo Roundup

Article
10/29/2008

I have talked a little bit about Oslo in the past (Oslo Sneak Peak) but not too much given the launch at PDC. At the conference the proverbial "cat is out of the bag".

It all started with the “Lap Around Oslo” session yesterday. If you missed the conference you can watch the recorded session and the Lap Around Oslo presentation itself. This was the first public demo of the Oslo components, including the “M” language, “Quadrant” visual toolset and repository.

Oslo Tracks at PDC

“Oslo”: The Language
“Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience
“Oslo”: Repository & Models
“Oslo”: Building Textual DSLs

Architecture Overview

Below is an overview of the Oslo architecture. I am not going to go into too much detail right now as there has been a ton of coverage on Oslo so far. See below in the resources section.

Quadrant

Visual modeling tool to see the graphical information
Development environment for models
Adapters will be provided for other MS modeling tools such as Visio

"M" a.k.a. Model Language Overview

“M” is a language for defining domain models and textual domain-specific languages (DSLs)
M domain models define schema and query over structured data
Values, Constraints, and Views
Natural projection to SQL
M DSLs define projections from Unicode text to structured data
Rule-based transformation
Grammar-driven text editor integration

Repository (don't have a whole lot of info here)

The repository that will store all of the model information
Provide data driven services to drive certain tasks
API for integration of other tools such as Office, VSTS, etc.

To earn more at PDC, download the CTPs or Oslo SDK and check out the new resources at the Dev Center. The “M” language is under the Open Specification Promise. By doing so, “M” it makes it possible for third parties, including open source projects, to build implementations of "M" for other runtimes, services, applications and operating systems.

Resources