“Oslo” May 2009 CTP Released!
Yesterday Microsoft released the May 2009 CTP for “Oslo”. This was a surprise release for me as I was not expecting another release till August this year
. But as promised they are coming out with frequent releases to keep the community interested and engaged, which I think is good. To know more about what’s new in this release and what has changed, I would suggest you go through the blog post by Kraig, Kent, and Chris (editors on the "Oslo" Developer Center) and the release notes. You can download the CTP from here.
The biggest news is that Microsoft finally decided to release Quadrant (GUI tool to interact with domain models stored in the repository and to create Visual DSLs) this time around and what they say is that this is a much improved version from what we saw in the VPC that was given out in the last PDC. From what I hear they have also worked a lot on improving the performance of Intellipad. I just hope it stops crashing frequently and opens up faster! The M language specification as expected has undergone changes and additions and it would be interesting to see how much easier have creating domain models and DSLs using the language become.
The team has also updated the documentation for the “Oslo” platform on MSDN. I think the lack of sufficient documentation has been one of the key challenges that people faced in their effort to understand the platform and I hope Microsoft comes out with better documentation for things like customizing Intellipad, adding new modes, error handling within Intellipad, System.Dataflow APIs etc.
