I’ve defined the way I’d like to create my blogs, posts and blogrolls in a textual way:

Blog
    With Title OsloBlog
    Section Posts
        Post With Title MGrammar And Desc MGrammar
        Post With Title Quadrant And Desc Quadrant
    End Section
    Section Blogroll
        Link With Title Oslo And Url http://microsoft.com
        Link With Title Michael And Url http://michaelwolbert.nl
    End Section
End Blog
Blog
    With Title MichaelBlog
    Section Posts
        Post With Title Avanade And Desc Ava
        Post With Title Testing123 And Desc Testing123456789
    End Section
End Blog

With our grammar (parser) we can now create projections of our textual DSL:

Blog[
    Title[
      "MichaelBlog"
    ],
    Sections[
      Posts[
        Post[
          Title[
            "Avanade"
          ],
          Desc[
            "Ava"
          ]
        ],
        Post[
          Title[
            "Testing123"
          ],
          Desc[
            "Testing123456789"
          ]
        ]
      ]
    ]
  ]

Next step would be to push this projections to Oslo’s repository (just a plain ol’ SQL 2008 database), so a runtime can access it. We could also create a runtime which uses a set of classes to parse our textual DSL directly to the runtime. But that will be covered later on.

See this Intellipad screenshot for the textual DSL, the MGrammar and the projections (from L to R).

Some nice samples can be found in the “M” Language Gallery. Especially Natural Language Dates has some good pointers to get started.

This week the Innovasia program will be finished with a symposium on our findings in India and on outsourcing in particulair. The new Innovasia website contains a lot of info on our visit to Bangalore for people who are interested or would like to follow the same program next year.

Besides Innovasia, I have been very busy preparing for my intern at Avanade to graduate next semester. Avanade is a joint-venture between Accenture (80%) and Microsoft (20%). Its Dutch office is based in Almere: near Amsterdam. The topic of the project will be focused on model-driven software development using domain specific languages (DSLs). This will be done in Microsoft’s newest platform called Microsoft Oslo. I’m very excited about learning these subjects, because it seems they have become very popular over the years. I’m completely new to this, at least it hasn’t been teached by my university. The start of this intern will be around the 1st of February. I’ll keep you posted!

The holiday was also quite good! :-) Tijmen Ruizendaal and I decided to celebrate NYE somewhere different than our hometown Utrecht. Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Pisa, Prague, Copenhagen, Berlin.. train, bus, plane.. we really didn’t know where and how to go. We probably waited way to long because flighttickets skyrocketed and traintickets became very scarce. Suddenly we had this thought of getting there without the need of paid transportation: hitchhiking! We decided to go to Copenhagen by the thumb, what a ride and what a stay! :-) I still have to grab some of the photos (not that much) of my camera and upload them to Flickr. Keep around, I’ll upload them soon!