Oslo
The first thing that I started understanding about was Oslo. Oslo is a platform for model driven applications. There are a host of sessions around Olso and a web site at MSDN dedicated for the same: http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi-in/oslo/default(en-us).aspx. From here, you can download the Oslo SDK.
The first step in getting over Oslo was the installation of the M language. I had written an earlier blog post about single letter languages making a come back and here is another one :-) Before poking around the M language (which I will write in another post), I had to install the SDK.
As all installations tend to fail, my first attempt at installing the SDK failed by not creating the repository for the models in the SQL Server. I had a named instance of SQL Server 2008. Some poking around in the forums for Oslo revealed that this was a common issue, but finally, I managed to sift through all of them and address my specific issue, which I will explain here.
Basically, during installation, because of the named instance of SQL Server, the installer was not able to create the default model repository database and upload some files into it. When I started doing this manually, although I had given a custom connection string, it still tried to reach the domain controller for authenticating logon and this failed, as I was working offline. Thus, the creation of the database manually also failed.So it looks like I needed to be on the network. The manual commands for creating the repository look like the following:
CreateRepository /cs:"Server=<your server>;User Id=user;Password=pass" /db:<instance name>
Thus successfully creates a database by name Repository and puts in a whole host of stuff into it. Next was to upload a model image and this command worked well.
Mx /i <image file.mx> -db:<database name> -s:<instance> -u:user -p:password
So after both these, I was up and running.
Oslo also comes with a new text editor called Intellipad that allows you to create models. Not sure why the team did not just integrate it into Visual Studio, but the editor today is quite primitive. So in the long run, it may get sophisticated.
Now, for creating some models....