A few weeks ago the PDC people sent to the Regional Directors the goals and theme of today’s Keynote by Don and Chris. They said: “ It will be Don and Chris writing code in Notepad for an hour!”

I replied that I hate when Don codes in Notepad, I think it is a silly thing to do. It only confuses the audience and sends a message that this technology is just a hack since you have to use Notepad. Then the other Regional Directors chimed in with loads of reasons why Notepad is not good for a PDC keynote.

Don and Chris got the message and used Visual Studio in the keynote and the keynote was a lot of fun. Don starts the keynote with the goal to write a service that iterates through all of the processes running on the demo box. Chris then wrote a method that will delete a process (kill) via a service. Don then said “No presenter would ever use Notepad to deliver a session.” He then opened four instances of Notepad and wrote a call to the service to kill all four Notepad instances. Don then said “Regional Directors around the world are now applauding.” (We then did!) Don said if you read between the lines: “OK RDs I took your advice, but I am still Don Box!” I love that.

Don and Chris then took the same service and pointed it to a Live Mesh desktop (and it deleted a folder named notepad). They then took the service and hosted it in Windows Azure services. They had a service running in the cloud that manipulated processes running on their desktop. (Well in the real world you would not do this, but hey it is pretty cool.)

After being called out by Don Box in the keynote, I spent the rest looking at the Oslo stuff. Oslo is a new modeling platform for application development that revolves around a language (M), a tool (quadrant), and a repository (SQL Server).

M is a language where you can model your application and data as well as create your own contextual Domain Specific Languages (DSL). The DSL piece is the best part of M, but I will not write anything about it until later this week as not to steal the thunder of the M: DSL session on Thursday at PDC.

Here is a simple speak peek at M in general, I model a type called Employee (which will map to a SQL table) and insert data in a code specific way. (At the end of the day this code will produce TSQL.) While this may not appear all that sexy, it will be far more efficient for a team to develop, implement, and maintain applications and services (and just imagine putting a DSL on top of this!) You can use a DSL to map text to data so you can import data real easily or have end users write data for you.

module HRApplication

{

type Employee

{

Id : Integer32 = AutoNumber();

Name : Text;

Title : Text;

Salary: Integer32;

} where identity(Id);

Employees : Employee*

{

{ Name = "Vassil", Title = "CEO" , Salary=1000000},

{ Name = "Steve", Title = "CSO" , Salary =250000},

{ Name = "Todd", Title = "CE" , Salary=500000}

}

}

Go get M and the Oslo SDK here: msdn.microsoft.com/oslo.

Lastly, I ran into old friend Dan Fernandez and he had me dress up as Dr. Code.