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You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, Program Manager in the Distributed Systems Group at Microsoft. I've also written some tools and done some writing, both targeted at the Windows developer. Enjoy.

Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet

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MGraph Visualizer Plug-in for Intellipad!

Ceyhun Ciper is at it again, this time taking advantage of the Intellipad plug-in capabilities in the "Oslo" May 2009 CTP and adding real-time "M" visualization as you type. This is a wonderful way to see both the textual and graphic abstract symbol tree of your data as you type it. Keep up the good work, Ceyhun!

Monday, June 29, 2009 2:38 PM  (0 Replies)

JavaScript implementation of "M"

Matthew Wilson is pushing "M" into the land of browser client-side scripting with his partial (but growing!) JavaScript implementation, as seen in his web 3-pane "M" grammar mode ala Intellipad. It's work like this that could make "M" a cross-platform solution for languages as well as data types and values. Good job, Matt!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:43 AM  (0 Replies)

Deep Fried Bytes: Shawn Wildermuth on "Oslo"

Keith and Woody speak with the first repeat guest of the podcast, Shawn Wildermuth about Oslo and the M language.  In this episode listeners will get some real world examples and use cases for using Oslo and M along with a clearer understanding about DSLs and what the future may hold.

Be warned, this podcast uses the phrase "bowled shrimp." : )

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 4:09 PM  (2 Replies)

Need a visualization of "M" in your programs?

If you want to display "M" languages or values, Ceyhun Ciper from sixpairs.com has got you covered with the MGraph Object Model Display Library for WPF. It's as simple as this:

Canvas canvas = new ObjectModel().Display(
  "Person {Name=>'Ciper', 47, 'sixpairs\n.com'}");

Sweet!

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 7:48 AM  (0 Replies)

From DSLs & Models to “Quadrant” w/ “Oslo” May CTP

Dana Kaufman, a PM on the extended "Oslo" team, has been blogging a series of articles on the definition of a set of "M" types, the associated "M" language definition for a domain-specific language (DSL) and concluding in how that data can be visualized and manipulated in "Quadrant" (the first two parts are available now and the third is coming). Enjoy!

Tuesday, June 09, 2009 11:37 AM  (0 Replies)

Actipro's SyntaxEditor Adds Support for "Oslo"!

Do you like Intellipad so much that you want to host it? If so, than you need Actipro's SyntaxEditor, which is not only a kick-butt syntax highlighting editor, but can be completely driven by an "Oslo" language definition in a .mg file. The demo is free and one of the samples is a fun little Intellipad clone. Check it out!

Thursday, June 04, 2009 5:43 PM  (0 Replies)

Helping to set up fireworks for the 4th of July?

Last year right after the 4th of July, one of my kind readers offered to let the me and the boys help set up and set off this year's 4th of July show in or around Portland. However, I can't find who offered. If that kind reader is still out there, can you drop me a line? I'm sure my 60-year-old father would like to help, too. Thanks!

Wednesday, June 03, 2009 3:31 PM  (1 Replies)

MGDisplay: Visualize Parsed "Oslo" Grammars

I love our customers. They do things like take our bits and produce MGDisplay, a tool written by Ceyhun Ciper for visualizing the parse tree produced by parsing a DSL instance document with a "M" language definition. Enjoy!

Friday, May 29, 2009 8:39 AM  (1 Replies)

Questions from Pinky on "Oslo"

Jeff Pinkston, the lead program manager on the "M" languages team has some questions that he'd love your feedback on:

• How do you think about "M" inter-operating with XML? XSD? Other data formats?
• Given that OO languages are nominally typed and "M" is structurally typed, what is the purpose of a type? How do you think about it?

The "Oslo" team is just at the beginning of our last real milestone before the PDC in November, so the answers to these questions help us to decide how to spend our time. I know that it seems like Microsoft has the ability to crank out the great works of Shakespeare, but we're limited by time and resources, too, so if you have an opinion on these questions, drop by Pinky's place and let him know what you think. Or, if you've got other suggestions about how to improve "Oslo", drop them into our suggestion box!

Thursday, May 28, 2009 3:21 PM  (0 Replies)

"'Oslo', the May CTP and You" at the PDX Code Camp

I'll be speaking at the Portland Code Camp on Saturday, May 30th, just as the May CTP of "Oslo" is hot off the presses:

As you may or may not know, "Oslo" is also a place. However, we're not going to talk about that. Instead, Chris Sells, a member of the technical staff on the Microsoft "Oslo" team, is going to give you a quick intro to "Oslo," including "M" and Quadrant, taking you end-to-end on a few real-world-ish examples and then wave his hands furiously about the rest, begging you to give it a try and complain loudly and often so we can get it right before we ship v1.0.

Come one, come all! Bring a friend and get a free GUID!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:08 PM  (0 Replies)

Oslo May 2009 CTP Available Now

The May 2009 CTP of "Oslo" available on the Developer Center contains a new unified setup, an Intellipad with an integrated DSL authoring mode, the UML domain and the CLR domain, a slimmed-down SDK with the samples and the documents available on the DevCenter, a unified tool set for the "M" language and, the one that folks have been most anticipating, Quadrant.

For more details about what's new, check out the letter from Kraig and Kent and the release notes. Also, in the coming weeks and months, Kraig and Kent have a pipeline of content for the DevCenter to keep you informed about how we're using "Oslo" and how you can use it better. If you've got suggestions, please use the Connect site and don't hesitate to post your questions on the forum.

Enjoy!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 7:26 PM  (14 Replies)

Flinging My 60-year-old Mother High Into The Air

My mom came to visit to celebrate my 40th birthday and her 60th birthday. She and the Sells Brothers and I spent yesterday afternoon wandering along the waterfront, checking out exotic animals, ditching lame cowboy comedians and eating elephant ears. And then, to put a point on the day, we launched ourselves 100 feet into the air on a giant bungle cord machine.

As part of this, my eldest son decided at the peak of our arch to spit in spite of my objections. You can see in the video us reacting to our falling at the same rate at his glob of saliva which is the clearest demonstration of Galileo's gravity experiment from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa that I've ever seen.

Enjoy. We did. : )

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 11:30 AM  (0 Replies)

"Olso": Hot or Not?

A coupla weeks ago, I did two days with of meeting, greeting, talking and interviewing at a Dutch company in The Netherlands named Sioux. They do a conference with the politically incorrect name of “Hot or Not,” which includes an even more politically incorrect picture of two women as part of their advertising, one lovely and one… less so. They have done this conference 12 times before (I was lucky number 13, just like Bilbo) and the goal is to have someone known for a particular technology come and give a talk, e.g. Alan Cox on Linux, and then rate the technology as “Hot” or “Not.” Since they couldn’t get someone good for Oslo, they had to settle for me.

I spent day one having lunch with the Sioux engineers who were very insightful in their questions about how models fit into their process (all kinds of ways), how it works for embedded systems (XML generation), how it works across platforms (MSC and OSP, baby!), etc. After lunch, I had time to work on my demos and slides (whew) and play with a desktop electron microscope. We must’ve spent an hour looking through fly parts at 26,000 times magnification. They build seriously cool software at Sioux!

My “Oslo” talk was 2.5 hours long with a 30 minute cocktail break. I thought the Dutch were loud before the alcohol was served, but that was nothing… : )  There were 120 attendees in the room they’d set aside for me, and they’d turned away another 60 more that had wanted to come. I did Don Box and Doug Purdy’s “Lap Around Oslo” talk with a German twist (“this picture of the Fairytale Castle is a model, not the castle itself”), David Langworthy’s M talk (“let’s parse a simple sentence”) and showed off Spork, WIX, MUrl and MService. The audience’s questions were even more insightful, e.g. what about schema versioning? Why a new language? How do you debug a declarative language? Can I embed languages in each other? What if I want to use an M language without a database at all?

At the end, I was awarded a book on Dutch culture (very useful! Now I know why the bicycles throw themselves in front of my car and why it wasn’t such a big deal as I thought for me to have to drive up on the sidewalk a little…). And then, without so much as a courtesy screen, the vote was called right in front of me – thumbs up, Oslo “hot” or “not?” I was to learn later that this is a serious thing – they’ve rated at least one technology as only 30% hot.

Luckily for my pride and my continued employment, Oslo was rated 98% hot. That made the magazine interviewing the next day much less embarrassing I’ll tell you!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 4:51 PM  (2 Replies)

James Clark Getting Involved in M

James Clark, the father of the world's fastest XML parser (according to his bio) is helping us with M on the M Specification Community. He had some initial thoughts that I thought were interesting. I'm sooo glad he's keeping us honest!

Thursday, May 07, 2009 12:08 PM  (0 Replies)

Dutch "Computable" Interviews Chris Sells on Oslo

The translation from Dutch is pretty good: "The better you can describe applications in models, the less code you need to write and the more transparency you provide to developers and others." Computable spoke with Chris Sells. De programmamanager van de Connected Systems Divisie van Microsoft was in Nederland voor een Hot-or-Not lezing, georganiseerd door Sioux. The program manager of the Connected Systems Division of Microsoft in the Netherlands for a Hot-or-Not reading, organized by Sioux.

But they chose the strangest picture...

Tuesday, May 05, 2009 11:00 AM  (2 Replies)

Joel Spolsky talks about Wasabi: His FogBugz DSL

In Scott Hanselman's April 2009 podcast, Visiting Fog Creek Software and Joel Spolsky, Joel talks about Wasabi, FogCreek's VBScript compiler, and he talks about it really being a subset of VBScript used specifically for bringing FogBugz to Unix and the CLR. In fact, it's a VBScript compiler built specifically to compile a single application, doing things like making the 5% of ADO.NET they use cross-platform. And just in case the point isn't completely obvious, Joel and Scott draw the conclusion for us: Wasabi is the domain-specific language just for FogBugz. Just another DSL in nature.

Sunday, May 03, 2009 9:45 AM  (0 Replies)

CodeCast: Oslo and M with Paul Vick

Our own Paul Vick is on CodeCast: The Late Night Show for .NET Developers, with your hosts Ken Levy, Gary Short, and Markus Egger. Enjoy!

Friday, April 17, 2009 1:24 PM  (0 Replies)

Win7 killed a feature I love in Vista!

All my friends have updated to Windows 7. My 14-year old son is running Win7. I'm the only one I know that's not running Windows 7. The reason? Windows 7 took away a feature I use all the time, as shown on the right: Search the Internet.

Here's what I do all day, every day in Vista: Ctrl+Esc to bring up the Start menu, then I start typing. If I'm searching on my HD, I immediately get matches and I can choose one with just the arrows and the Enter key. If I'm typing in the name of a program in the Start menu, I get those matches and choose one. If I want "calc" or "notepad" I can just type those and those work.

However, 80% of the time, I want to search the internet, so enter my search term, optionally including attributes like "site:", I press, down-arrow once, highlight "Search the Internet" and press Enter. This brings up my default browser with my search results in my default search engine without me having to move the mouse or open the browser and wait for the home page or even decide where I want the search results to come from until after I've entered my search phrase.

And they took it out of Windows 7. : (

I logged the bug and heard nothing.

Does anyone know of I 3rd party program I can run that will work exactly like the Vista Start menu under Windows 7? Please?

Friday, April 17, 2009 11:43 AM  (12 Replies)

Twitter takes a bite out of blogs

At the last DevCon in 2003, blogging was rampant. We had about 100 posts in the lead up to the conference and during the conference itself.

A this year's DSL DevCon, there's a ton of buzz, but almost none of it is in the blogosphere. Instead, it's all in Twitter.Last I checked, it was more than 150 tweets and we're still on the first talk of the 2nd day (and day #1 was only a half day).

The worm has turned.

Friday, April 17, 2009 9:24 AM  (0 Replies)

Three "Oslo" Talks at VSLive in June!

This year's VSLive in Las Vegas (June 8-11), has three, count 'em three, "Oslo" talks! (And a Dublin talk to boot.) Just a few months ago, the "Oslo" team was giving all the talks and now there are so many of them I have to hear about them on the street! Our baby grew up so fast...

And as if that weren't enough, Jon Flanders gave me a code for a discount:

"If you register with code S9V10 you can get and all-access Passport Package for just $1,295, a savings of $400.00 off the standard price of $1,695."

I know I loved MIX in Vegas last month and I'm jealous I don't get to go back in June. Put some money down on 22 for me!

Saturday, April 11, 2009 6:37 PM  (0 Replies)

Real-World Credit Card Validation Rules w/ "Oslo"

This is a wonderful article on the use of an "M" grammar to parse a set of rules specific to credit card validation and then parse those rules at run-time to drive a framework for doing the validation itself. The article does a marvelous job of motivating the use of a custom DSL for construction and validation by non-engineers and then lays out the entire grammar and C# loader code. Recommended.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009 7:53 AM  (1 Replies)

Run your house with Oslo!

Kris Horrocks in our marketing team is using Oslo to run his house via X10. He's got two posts on it and it's damn cool! Hmmm... How much to get X10 at my house...

Wednesday, April 01, 2009 6:33 AM  (0 Replies)

DSL DevCon: More Attendees Than Ever

This year's DevCon for DSLs has 25% more attendees than any other previous DevCon. In this economy, I'm amazed by this.

And it's not just people from the US or even the Pacific Northwest. Not only do we have people from all over the country, but folks are coming from Canada, the UK, Scotland, France, South America and one attendee, Tomas Petricek, a student at Charles University, is coming from the Czech Republic.

Luckily, as we slide into home, there are still a scant few seats left if you'd like to register, but be quick before they're all gone!

I so miss this conference. Why don't I do this more often?!

Monday, March 30, 2009 7:38 AM  (3 Replies)

InfoQ: Oslo news and content

The nice folks over at InfoQ have been building up some Oslo content and reporting on Oslo news. Check it out!

Thursday, March 26, 2009 6:01 PM  (0 Replies)

Watch the Oslo Mix '09 Talk: Developing RESTful Services and Clients with "M"

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. Speakers: Douglas Purdy & Chris Sells

Monday, March 23, 2009 2:57 PM  (0 Replies)

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