Oslo

IMPORTANT: I have moved my blog to http://blog.brianloesgen.com

Brian Loesgen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:19:40 GMT

=======================================================================

IMPORTANT: this is my old blog and is not being updated anymore.

For my new site/blog/RSS, please visit http://blog.brianloesgen.com

=======================================================================

I’ll be speaking at Code Camp San Diego this weekend

Brian Loesgen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:30:10 GMT

San Diego Code Camp is this weekend! I’ll be there on Saturday, doing two presentations:

If you’ve never been to a Code Camp before, you should check it out. It’s an “anything goes” community-driven conference-ish event. Lots of high quality sessions, at a recession-friendly cost (free). Lots of learning opportunities. What’s not to like?

As usual, this will be at UCSD La Jolla. See you there!

Full details are at http://www.socalcodecamp.com/

Technorati Tags: Azure,Cloud,SOA,ESB,BizTalk,Oslo,M,Models

My Oslo “M” end-to-end demo

Brian Loesgen — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:25:58 GMT

[[ 23:00 pacific time Apr 24 2009 – Update… there were some issues with the videos (although they all worked fine on my Win 7 box!). I’m re-encoding some new ones, the SkyDrive folder below will have a few choices. Please let me know of any issues. ]]

As part of my “M” end-to-end presentation in Stockholm last week, I came up with a way to walk through MSchema, MGrammar, MGraph and Intellipad that went over really well with the conference attendees. They “got” what I was talking about, rather than walking out with glazed-over eyes, so…. As I’d put so much work into it and it seemed to resonate well with the audience, I thought I should record it and push it out to the world.

Caveat: although this is based on the now-current Oslo SDK, we are still pretty early on in the dev life cycle, so change is pretty much assured. As such, if you’re watching this in the year 2010, some of the things I say and do may no longer be applicable. However, for those here and now and interested in learning more about the Oslo modeling platform, I think you’ll find it of interest.

I had to do it at a fairly high resolution in order to fit everything I wanted to and still have the “code” legible (if you have a DSL that looks like a human language, is it still called “code”?).

To see the video, click the link below and then pick your favorite flavor. Click it and press the “download” button above it.

Enjoy, and as always, comments and feedback are welcome.

Technorati Tags: Oslo,MUrl,M,Intellipad,models,DSL

Issue with the first release of MUrl sample and Twitter

Brian Loesgen — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:28:59 GMT

I ran into an issue working with the AWESOME MUrl sample trying to reach Twitter from inside Intellipad (running in “MUrl mode”). I’m doing this post for the benefit of others that may run also into this, there are actually two solutions…

If you haven’t seen MUrl in action, please see my previous post about it and do check it out. Bottom line is that the sample is a DSL (written in “M” of course) for doing REST client requests, and “MUrl mode” lets you do those requests right from inside Intellipad. Super cool…

Where I ran into an issue was that although I was able to query Twitter no problem with MUrl from Intellipad, when I tried posting I would get an “Expectation Failed” error message. I was somewhat amused that somehow it seemed that I was not living up to some service’s expectations :) … but mostly I was annoyed that I could not do this. After a bit of looking around, I found this post that explained what was going on.

I made the code change to the MUrlRuntime.cs file as shown below:

Alternatively, you could make the equivalent change by adding this to the ipad.exe.config:

<system.net>

</settings>

</system.net>

Technorati Tags: Oslo,M,MUrl,DSL

(for the benefit of Oslo people using search engines, other text in the error message was “Expect: 100-continue”, and some text from Twitter saying “we only allow the 100-continue expectation”)

Practical Oslo Examples Starting to Emerge…

Brian Loesgen — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:56:22 GMT

In recent days there’s been some interesting movement in Oslo-land:

Doug Purdy and Chris Sells did a presentation at Mix09 that showed a domain-specific language for invoking RESTful services, and how to use M to create RESTful services
BizTalk MVP Yossi Dahan has published (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) details about his domain-specific approach to BizTalk deployments
Kris Horrocks has started blogging, and posted his domain-specific approach to interacting with X10 home automation

What these three things have in common is that this is the start of practical examples of how you can author a DSL using M, and how the DSL could be used to simplify the effort required to do things (ie: reduce the amount of code you need to write). Up until now it’s been interesting to watch, but there hasn’t been much in the way of practical examples. The fact that these are starting to emerge speaks to the increasing maturity of the project.

The path to learning this stuff starts with M, then you move on to creating DSLs using MGrammar, and then the final phase is creating a runtime that is actually doing something with the data produced by your DSL. This is where Doug and Chris’s presentation (I highly recommend you click the link above and watch it) really resonates well. The “Murl” effort they’ve been working on (available here) makes it really easy to create a REST client.

The sample also shows how extensible Intellipad is, by adding a new “mode” that enables actually USING the DSL (parsing *and* executing) from inside Intellipad and calling RESTful services. Very cool! The code you see below is the syntax of the DSL used to call REST services.

But, in my opinion, the most exciting part of their presentation was the MService part, which is a (work-in-progress, not released) way to create a RESTful service, using a DSL written in M. The screen shot below shows the service definition in the left-hand pane, and the generated SQL in the right-hand pane (red arrows indicates some of the relationships between the two).

They saved the file out to c:\inetpub\wwwroot, and made a REST request (from Intellipad, using Murl-mode, just because they could :)). There’s a handler that IIS routes the request for a “*.m” resource request to. It’s an entirely self-bootstrapped operation, if the service sees no storage it will create the storage.

M is all about writing down data, and the ultimate output is structured data in the form of MGraph. Where this becomes tangible and payoff is realized is when we use a runtime to do interesting things with that data, and MService is the best example of this that I’ve seen thus-far. It’s a tantalizing view of how developers will create applications in the future.

[UPDATED: I just found out there’s a “language gallery” with links to sample languages people are creating. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/cc749619.aspx]

Technorati Tags: Oslo,M,DSL

I will be speaking in Stockholm on Oslo

Brian Loesgen — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:15:04 GMT

[Even though it may have been more appropriate to speak on Oslo in Oslo? :)]

Next month I will be speaking at the Cornerstone Developer Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. I will be doing 2 sessions, one on M, the other on the new wave of Microsoft SOA offerings (Oslo, BizTalk, Dublin, Azure, .NET 4, et al) and how things fit together from an architectural perspective.

I’m looking forward to this event, I hear it’s a top-notch event and always a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to catching up with a couple of my old friends Julie Lerman and Scott Bellware. I’m also trying to get to the local BizTalk user group where MVP Alan Smith and I will present a BizTalk Best Practices session.

To find out more, or to sign up for the conference, visit:

http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/ExpertZone/developersummit/2009/Startsida/Arkitektur/

Technorati Tags: Oslo,BizTalk,Dublin,Azure,WCF,WF

January 2009 “Oslo” SDK (CTP) Released

Brian Loesgen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:15:12 GMT

Oslonians, and you know who you are, the new Oslo SDK just went live and you can download it here.

It doesn’t sound like there’s any earth shattering newness here, more like a stabilization effort, although there are what sounds like some interesting additions on the MGrammar side. Chris and Kent blog about it here, and you can read the release notes here.

I expect (hope!) to be doing some interesting things with this new technology in a couple of months, so watch for that here.

Technorati Tags: Oslo

New year, new role…. I have joined Microsoft.

Brian Loesgen — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:21:49 GMT

This has been a while coming, and is a big change for me personally, so I can be verbose in my post about it.

When I joined Neudesic (wow, I’ve been blogging a long time) more than 5 years ago, I was employee #12. The company has grown rapidly to somewhere over 250 people now, offices across the US and offshore. During my tenure with Neudesic, I had the opportunity to be involved in some very advanced, high-profile and challenging projects. It was a fun ride, and I like to think that my efforts contributed to the growth of the company and its reputation.

However, all that changes this week, as I have joined Microsoft. My title is Principal SOA Architect, and my territory is the US SouthWest.

Some things will change:

I’m not an MVP anymore as I’m no longer “independent”
I resigned as President of the San Diego .NET user group (after something like 7 years) although I continue to lead the Connected Systems SIG, and remain a Director (they wouldn’t let me leave)

Other things will not change:

I will continue helping customers use technology to improve processes, realizing operational cost savings and increased efficiencies
I will continue to immerse myself in new technologies, and evangelize them
I keep living in San Diego, although I may continue playing a role in supporting various airlines :)
This blog lives on: it is my intention to continue blogging here (remember the new URL: blog.BrianLoesgen.com). This may change, but I don’t think so at this time.

The reaction I’ve gotten from everyone (inside and outside Microsoft) has been phenomenal. Everyone thinks this role is ideal for me, and I think so too. I get to harness my passion for technology to help customers, and to do so on a greater scale than before, what’s not to like? If you’ve been following my posts or seen me speak about Oslo/Dublin/BizTalk/Azure/.NET 4, you’ll know that I’m really excited about this whole wave of technologies coming towards us. This time around, I’ll surf the wave from inside.

So, I’m excited, and looking forward to the road ahead…

I’ll be doing an “Oslo” overview presentation tomorrow (Jan 15 2009) night in Santa Ana at the IASA meeting

Brian Loesgen — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:00:50 GMT

I’ll be doing an “Oslo” presentation tomorrow night at the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) SoCal chapter. Meeting is at Rancho Santiago Community College District, 2323 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Meeting starts at 7:00 pm, pizza and networking 6:30 pm. RSVP by emailing to davidw@softw.com if you plan to attend. Hope to see you there!

A Look at Microsoft’s “Oslo” Modeling Platform

Microsoft’s “Oslo” project is part of a major initiative that represents a wave of technologies aimed at making it easier to construct, deploy and manage distributed applications and services. It is an evolution of SOA technologies, encompassing Windows Communications Foundation, the next version of .NET, BizTalk Server, Windows Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio and more. Using those technologies as a starting point and building on them, Oslo introduces a modeling language, tooling and a repository that allow the creation of role-based tools that can be used throughout an application’s lifecycle.

The impact “Oslo” will have on the developer community using Microsoft tools cannot be understated. The goal of "Oslo" is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, languages, and tools.

In this session we will take an early look at the architecture, some of the capabilities and tools that “Oslo” provides and enables.

Technorati Tags: Oslo,SOA,Dublin,BizTalk

I have been re-awarded MVP Status (for a 6th year)

Brian Loesgen — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 01:40:40 GMT

I'm honored to announce that Microsoft has, for a 6th consecutive year, awarded me MVP status.

2008 was a turbulent year, that saw me achieve elite and ultra-elite status with multiple airlines and hotels, with far too many hotel nights and air miles. It feels like I probably spent more time away from home than I did at home.

As we start 2009, we have a lot of fear, uncertainty and change ahead of us. The global economic upheaval that has touched us all will lead to changes which I don't think we can fully grasp yet, and in that change, will lie opportunities.

One thing is certain though. We as an industry are on an exciting ride. So many enabling technologies have matured to the point that we can use them now to construct systems that only a few short years ago were un-imaginable. I am so excited by the possibilities I see in Oslo/BizTalk/Azure/Dublin/WF/WCF. No matter what lies ahead, I plan to continue on that voyage, and blog about the trip we're all on. There will be lots to talk about...

Happy New Year!

Brian