Lars Wilhelmsen

First of all; I would like to apologize for not producing any new content on this blog the last couple of month. There are many reasons for that; a lot of work for my current customer, being together with my son as much as possible – and the probably most important one; it’s been a really dark, cold and snowy winter here i Norway I’m no bear – but I feel that I’ve been hibernating this winter. Since the days is getting longer, I need to do as the bear; wake up from the hibernation and get “online” again. For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that that is almost the only social networking platform that I’ve used for a couple of months.

Another reason why I haven’t been around much either here or in the WCF forum is that I’ve gone into learning mode – and for the time being I’m focused at Codename “Oslo”.

I had the chance to attend the Global MVP Summit in Seattle last week and it was a blast! The whole conference was under a NDA that most people that use Twitter probably noticed, so I can’t go into a lot of details that was presented during keynotes and sessions.

But it’s not a secret that I’m a Connected Systems Developer MVP – and because of that, I “belong” to the Connected Systems Division. CSD as it is also called owns some great existing products like BizTalk, WCF & WF but the currently most hyped project is Codename “Oslo”. Revealed at the Professional Developers Conference in LA last October as Microsoft new platform for model-driven development. They state on the Oslo Development center that we should expect a ten-fold productivity increase – something that they’ve still to prove to us.

A lot of people I’ve talked to are really confused about what it is – and what technologies that sits under the “Oslo” umbrella.

For a period, I will try to write some blog posts to explain what “Oslo” is, what it can be used for and what I see as its strong and weak points (at the moment). No good explanations without code you might say – and that is totally correct.

First off, I’ll start with MGrammar – a language in the M* family for creating Domain-Specific Languages. This might not be a top-down approach to the Oslo platform, but I want to show some working code – and MGrammar is the technology I’ve been focusing mostly the last weeks.