I spoke at the very first meeting of the Cairo, Egypt based .network user group back in 2007. It will be my pleasure to speak at their first ever code camp in Cairo on Feb 19th and 20th (my birthday). Register here.

Earlier today the Oslo SDK January CTP was released on MSDN. A lot of people have been saying since the PDC, “What is Oslo?” Oslo is a new platform from Microsoft that allows you to build data driven applications. Oslo revolves around the application’s metadata. As Chris Sells describes on in a great white paper on Oslo:

Metadata can be defined as the data that describes an application, for example, how a home page is rendered or how the purchasing workflow operates. Your application data represents the state of the execution of an application, such as what Bob put in his shopping cart on your Web site or his shipping address in your checkout workflow.

To provide a common set of tools for defining metadata so that it can be stored in a place that provides the same set of features as normal application data, Microsoft is creating "Oslo," a platform for building data-driven applications. "Oslo" is composed of three elements: a family of languages collectively called "M," a visual data manipulation tool called "Quadrant," and a data store called the repository.

Telerik is building some cool Oslo utilities and I am in the middle of designing them. As I was talking to Chris about some of the specs the other day, he asked me: “What are you using to keep track of the metadata of your application in your design process?” I was like: “Pen, paper, whiteboard, Word and Excel.” He said why are you not using Oslo? Then it struck me, I was in .NET programmer mode. So last decade. While I am using Visual Studio 2008, WPF, SQL Server 2008 and the Oslo SDK to build an application for Oslo, I was not using Oslo to help build the application.

The application is in its earliest phases (just moving from idea and drawing on a whiteboard to design.) I confess, I made my first mistake, I did not think about a model, I was thinking about the app. So I started over and started to model what the app would do using Oslo. How do you model an application using Oslo? You use the M language.

Specifically at this phase you would use the MSchema portion of the M specification.  I started by creating a schema using MSchema to hold some application artifacts. This requires a different way of thinking, but it is worth the effort because now information about my application is stored in the repository and I will have version history and a much easier time generating the application when the time comes. (You can also use the MGraph portion of the M specification to create a domain specific language (DSL), however, that part of the process won’t come for this application until a little later on.)

As I make progress designing and building this application, I will post it here. You can follow along and learn from my mistakes. Stay tuned, look for the “Oslo” category on this blog.

Mary Chipman and I are doing a talk together at TechEd in Los Angeles this May on building solutions “without spending any money.” One of the tricks we will show is using an Access front end utilizing TVPs from the back end SQL Server. She posted a blog on the Access team’s blog about it yesterday. Check it out here.

If you attended my user group on data driven RESTful apps, you can download the slides and code here. Enjoy!

Due to my comment spam problem, the link to the ORM white paper I wrote got deleted. A month or so ago, I wrote a white paper for Telerik on ORMs in general and their ORM in particular. This white paper is mostly an intro to data access layers, what an ORM will give you and how they work. Here is the link.

I will speaking at the SQL Server User Group on Thursday at 6pm.

You must register to attend: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=134822

Location:  Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor

Directions: B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr 1 to 50th St./Bway N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

Session Info:
Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss ADO .NET Data Services or “Project Astoria” and see how we can REST enable your data. Then you will learn how to leverage existing skills related to LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. We will then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Silverlight Then switching gears we will look quickly at consuming of REST services from any platform (including Ruby on Rails) using Visual Studio and the WCF REST Starter kit. We will conclude with a discussion on developing offline applications with the ability to sync back to the online data service. This is a very demo intensive session.

If you are looking for the slides and code for my user group presentation: Data Access Hacks and Shortcuts, you can download it here. Please note, this session and its code is subject to some minor tweaks as the conference season kicks into high gear next month.

The Microsoft MSDN DevCon is this Tuesday. All you women attending, we will have a special Women In Technology event running in tandem sponsored by Lego. You can catch a video of me talking about women in technology here.