PDC09: Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language
Session by Don Box, Jeff Pinkston. Slides and video at http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT34
Just again to share my notes, thoughts and session highlights:
Don explains that "Oslo" was a broad vision out of which a lot of things emerged. He promises that there will be names at next PDC for the "Quadrant" and "M" code names.
"M" now consists of three parts:
The EDMX spec is new. "M" now becomes a DSL over the EDM format of Entity Framework (EF). Allows you to use a textual format to use with EF instead of the visual designer. No more ugly XML file edits.
The T-SQL spec was around last year. The names MSchema and MGraph (for instances) where used back then.
Few... the Grammar spec is still around. Called MGrammar last year. After the previous talk about "Quadrant" I was almost afraid they also removed the textual DSL stuff. Box explains it as a function to get from text to some structured piece of data.
Intellipad is still around, but you now can also write "M" in Quadrant AND in Visual Studio.
Integration with repositoy has become much better. You now just can hit deploy to database from intellipad without calling all the strange .exe tools like you had to do before.
Much easier API now to use your grammar parser inside visual studio. Just include you "M" file in your project and only a piece of code like this is needed:
Lot's of details about smaller new "M" features of all the three parts in this session. But I'll keep it just with this short overview for now.