Just watched PDC session with Douglas Purdy “A Lap around Oslo” and I as was expecting more, I am not disappointed, this is great.

What is then “Oslo” ?

• M – language for authoring models and DSL
• QUADRANT – Tool for interacting with models and DSL’s
• Repository – Database for storing and sharing models
  

Also as I understod there are four important aspect of “Oslo”.

• Models
• Textual DSL
• Visual DSL
• Runtime

First demos showed “Intellipad” and how to create an complex type (modell) with M language then converting this model to T-SQL. As sceptist are going to say, there is nothing new here, this could be easily done with any of the text manipulating languages as Ruby, Perl or other. Well yes, there is nothing special here, the special thing is that we are getting an platform to create MODEL DRIVEN APPLICATIONS, that is important!

And cool thing that now you could easily create you own language

Later demo showing how to create REST service in “just” thirthyeight lines of code with simple syntax and it was running as a WorkFlow Activity. I just LOVE rest oriented architecture…

The code was going something like this:

service FirstService
{
  operation Echo(str:Text):Text
  {
     .UriTemplate ="echo/{str}"; //The same as with WCF REST uritemplate
     WriteLine{ Text = "Message" +str } // WorkFlow
     return str;
 }
 endpoint HttpEndPoint //WCF!
 {
    Binding = WebHttpBinding;
    Adress = "http://localhost:8080/firstservice";
 }

}

Microsoft is also releasing M language specification under OSP.