MGrammar is one part of the new Oslo modeling language "M". At PDC this year I got to preent with Gio Della-Libera about MGrammar. They've posted the video on Channel 9 for the MGrammar talk.

This will be a short post, I'm having to use the web interface for BlogX to post. Why, you might ask. Because I'm having to rebuild my home machine from scratch. After getting all the right parts, Windows decided it was very unhappy having the motherboard switched out from under it. I ended up having to repave after spending ~4 hours getting the machine physically rebuilt. The good news, all my new hardware is installed and working great. I'll send out final specs when I am fully functional.

I went to PAX a week or so ago and I totally got the bug to start gaming again. I bought back into WoW and bought (and beat) Portal. I'm also upgrading my home machine to try and make it into a "Gaming Rig". Tonight I went to Fry's to buy a new case, mobo, and power supply while I wait for the new Intel chips to come out. All was good, a nice Antec Mini P180, a Corsair TX650W which was highly rated by SilentPC Review, and an Gigabyte P45-DS3R. The mobo was a bit low end, but the plan was to replace it in less than a year when the new socket hits the market. The problem, it turns out, is a small issue. On the way out of the store I caught sight of the Antec case and switched from the Coolmaster I was carrying. Of course, the Coolmaster was a tower that supported a full ATX mobo. The Antec, does not. No matter how many ways you look at it, an "up to microAT" case will not fit a full size mobo. Or, at least, that is what it looks like to me. A friend is coming over tonight and, I hope, will tell me that I'm an idiot and it fits, but it looks like another trip to Kent to swap out cases or mobo. Damn.

Over the past many years (long before I was directly involved) we have been working on a project to drastically change the economics of creating textual DSLs. At this PDC I get to be lucky enough to talk with Gio and help show off all the hard work of the team. "Oslo": Building Textual DSLs The "Oslo" modeling language can define schemas and transformations over arbitrary text formats. This session shows you how to build your own Domain Specific Language using the "Oslo" SDK and how to apply your DSL to create an interactive text editing experience.  

Congratulations to the MEF team for releasing MEF Preview 2 to CodePlex. Last year I got to spend a bunch of time working on MEF, and it was great. We now are basing a lot of our current work on MEF as the base model for component composition. At PDC you will get to hear more about how we are using MEF at Microsoft, but I can say that MEF is absolutely core to our text editing tool for Oslo, which has been called "Emacs.Net".

I'm not sure any can or does read my blog anymore. Permalinks are broken, and I don't post anymore. I really need to upgrade my software to dasBlog to fix the site. Oh well, too busy right now. "Busy on what?" you might ask. Well it turns out like Doug and Don I've been working on Oslo. Oslo means something slightly different to everyone, but to me it really means changing how people write software. Oslo is a modeling platform. Oslo provides a simple tool, language, and database for software. It has been amazing to work on this new platform for the past several years, and to build on the work that was started over 5 years ago. I have two talks that I'm working on. The first will be a broad talk covering a lot of technology and I get to talk with Don, and the second will let me work with Giovanni Della-Libera and help show of his technology that is part of Oslo. This is the third time I've had the chance to be at a platform launch. The first time was as a individual developer working on .NET. I went to the PDC where we launched the CLR and the .NET Framework, it was amazing. The second time was around WinFX where we launched WPF, Indigo, WF, and Vista. I look forward to seeing everyone at the PDC!

As Don said, the first CTP of the Managed Extensibility Framework is available. We use this code a bunch on my team and are building lots of stuff on top of it. It's great. Simple extensibility. I hope that it only gets simpler as we get feedback from customers. Please, be sure to share with the team what they can cut to make it even simpler! :)

Some ignorant TV producers decided to have a "Best Mom" competition where they commited a major faux pas. They classified mothers of adopted children as a "Non-Mom". It is amazing to me that in this day and age that anyone would be so blatantly insulting. As someone who has been going down the path to adopt, I must say that this is the first major incident I have encountered where I felt so much in a minority. I generally don't participate in letter writing campaigns or anything like this, but I feel compelled to at least send an email to this company and let them know that this is not acceptable. I'm not asking anyone else to participate in this, but if you are looking for contact information, here it is: AFM TV LLC. 11444 West Olympic blvd, 10th Floor Los Angeles, CA 90064 info@americasfavoritemom.com 800-225-7435 And, for those of you that want to see the original post: This is insulting in everyway

Doug wrote up posts about a bunch of our new jobs - both in the languages space and our text editor project. Of course, he neglected to mention a bunch of our UX projects, but that may be because we don't have an external link yet. The key thing; if you want to work on incredibly cool technology with a great team (I'm just happy they keep me around) you should think about coming on board.

Blog software is broken (permalinks don't work anymore, etc.) I'm months behind posting the source code for my book Sorry.

My team is growing again... this time we are looking for people to work on a new tool. Want to come help?

In keeping with tradition, another really bad job of singing.