Gerben van Loon : Oslo

So what happened to “Oslo”?

Gerben van Loon — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:10:00 GMT

This question still pops up every now and then. You can find quite a clear explanation on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb525059.aspx

"Oslo" / SQL Server Modeling

Gerben van Loon — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:43:00 GMT

A nice update and overview by Lars: http://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/what-is-left-of-microsoft-oslo-what-now-with-sql-server-modeling-early-2010/

Not a lot happening in this space lately. I only see the team blogging about OData. Still curious where this will go, especially for the M / Grammer part.

PDC09: Building Data-Driven Applications Using Microsoft Project Code Name "Quadrant" and Microsoft Project Code Name "M"

Gerben van Loon — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:01:00 GMT

Session by Chris Sells, Douglas Purdy. Slides and video at http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT50
Just to share my notes, thoughts and session highlights:

First the history about "Oslo" to clarify things up:

"Oslo" 2007: Very broad vision to generally enhance developer productivity. In 2008 things like .NET Services, WF4 runtime and AppFabric ("Dublin" part) emerged out of this.
"Oslo" 2008: Modeling platform. "M", "Quadrant" and the "Repository".
"Oslo" 2009: SQL Server Modeling. Still consists of the three previous parts above.

Confusing that the same code name was used for different things. But well, the above overview should clarify it up.

So the rest will be about SQL Server Modeling of course:

SQL Server will be the shipping vehicle. The three "Oslo" parts are now described as:

"M": An open data language
"Quadrant": A developer tool for SQL Server
"Repository": SQL Server to store your data

So the big surprise (for me) is that "Quadrant" has changed from being a tool for visual DSL's to a SQL dev tool.

Some statements about "Quadrant":

- It’s a data navigation tool / database data browser.
- Now can also write "M" inside.
- Allows you to quickly build forms over data. Also with master detail functionality.
- Can work with huge datasets.
- Purdy also calls it the MS Office Access for SQL Server.

T-SQL and SQL Server management studio (SSMS) are positioned to be for IT/DB pros.
"M" and "Quadrant" are the counterparts for developers.

They see the "Oslo" stuff as more abstract. Comparison with VB over C/C++ is made. Where C/C++ is T-SQL and SSMS and VB is "M" and "Quadrant".

So all cool stuff I think. Even now it's still positioned as a modeling platform. My main question is: Where can I do Visual DSL's today? Last year the team showed stuff like building WCF services and workflows with boxes and lines in "Quadrant". I need boxes and lines to do Visual DSL's. So where are they? Are they ever going to come back?

PDC09: Microsoft Project Code Name “M”: The Data and Modeling Language

Gerben van Loon — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:18:00 GMT

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.

“Oslo” renames to SQL Server Modeling

Gerben van Loon — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:56:00 GMT

I’m not sure what to think of the move announced by Doug Purdy. It’s not a complete surprise since the team recently moved more towards the data team, but I still am disappointed by this announcement.

In the past “Oslo” was announced as a modeling platform and a Language Workbench. It’s fine by me that the model are stored in SQL Server. But is that so important that you’re storage technique should be in the name of your product? Or is “Oslo” moving in another direction instead of becoming a Language Workbench?

Questionnaire DSL with Microsoft "Oslo" overview

Gerben van Loon — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:27:00 GMT

Intro

After PDC 2008 there was quite some confusion around what you can do with Microsoft “Oslo”. I was already busy with Domain-Specific Languages for a while so I got a general idea. There weren’t a lot of good and complete demos either for “Oslo”, so that didn’t help in getting “Oslo” clear for lots of people.

Last year back at Avanade I decided to start building a good showcase together with two enthusiastic graduation students (Michael Wolbert and Bryan Sumter) and Felienne Hermans from Delft University of Technology. Some of you may have already seen this at Code Generation 2009 where I did a session about “Oslo” together with Felienne or at the Achmea Technight where I did a similar session with Alex Thissen. More of you will start to see this demo since it will probably run at the “Oslo” booth at PDC09!

Bryan and Michael pulled this very well together so let me briefly describe what this is about.

The case

Our domain is questionnaires for insurance products. Before you get accepted for insurance product companies tend to ask quite some question so they can calculate risk. These questions generally change quite a lot or extra questions are added due to new insights by insurance experts. Now if you’re a big insurance company and sell quite some products you can build these questionnaires one-off every time, but that isn’t very handy.

The “Oslo” solution

Here is how you could solve this problem with Microsoft “Oslo”. I will only show you how this works for the end users and insurance experts, only briefly how this is build with “Oslo”.

1. Textual DSL

We wrote a textual DSL with M. Insurance experts can use this together with a developer to quickly specify all the possible questions and their types in Intellipad:

2. Visual DSL

After pushing into the repository from “Intellipad” the insurance expert can model the order and relationships of the questions in “Quadrant”.

3. Runtime

If the insurance expert and the developer are done in “Intellipad” and “Quadrant” we can launch the runtime. The runtime picks up all the data from “Intellipad” and “Quadrant” from the repository and shows the right questions. Optionally the developer can spend some time with stylesheets (css) to adjust the looks of the website. Finally the runtime can be used by customers to request insurance products. Questions can be changed (via “Quadrant”) or added ( via “Intellipad” and “Quadrant”) and the runtime will render accordingly.

Conclusion

So there you have it, a full case of how “Oslo” could be used for this problem. Again credits to Michael Wolbert and Bryan Sumter for pulling this together. Hope they start blogging about the inner things of how they got this working. Go check this out at the booth of the “Oslo” team at PDC09 if you’re lucky enough to be there.