Issues with “Oslo” SDK May 2009 CTP
“Oslo” is a very nascent yet promising technology. Hence working with the “Oslo” SDK in its current state does pose a lot of challenges. As I had mentioned in my previous post, the “Oslo” May CTP released a month back. We were working with the Jan CTP till last month and hence we were excited about the new CTP. The list of improvements that had been made seemed very impressive. The setup was really quick and easy. It was great to get a good first look at the Quadrant tool. But when we tried opening up the MGrammar file that we had developed using the Jan CTP in May CTP Intellipad, we faced a couple of issues.
First of all we weren’t even able to open up our grammar in the new DSL Grammar mode. The Intellipad took a lot of time but it just couldn’t parse the grammar and finally it threw an OutOfMemoryException. We could see that the memory usage on the machine was going up till 1.5GB!!! Intellipad was supposed to perform better with this release 
. Since this issue was a show stopper we raised a bug on the Microsoft “Oslo” Connect site. Microsoft agreed that this was indeed a bug, but they provided a work around as well. The issue, they said was cropping up because of the length of the names of the tokens that we had used in our Grammar. We were using some long token names within our grammar. We were surprised to know about this, because this was a grammar file which worked perfectly in Jan CTP Intellipad. The usage of shorter token names helped us solve this issue. You can check out the bug that we had raised and the work around suggested by Microsoft here.
Once the above issue got fixed we tried opening up the grammar again in Intellipad. It first of all took a long time to parse the grammar and finally it threw an ArgumentNullException. We had no clue why this was happening as this was raised by the M compiler. We raised another bug on the Microsoft “Oslo” Connect site for this issue. Once again the reply that we got from Microsoft was that this was indeed a bug in the M compiler and it had been fixed in their current codebase. Now we need to wait till the next CTP comes out probably in the month of November this year, to see whether they have actually solved the issue. You can check out the bug that we had raised in this regard, here.
Due to the above issues that we faced with the “Oslo” May 2009 CTP; we were forced to continue using the “Oslo” Jan 2009 CTP for our development work. Playing around with CTPs is not really an easy job, is it?
