Journey to "Oslo"

First time I heard of Microsoft's "Oslo" was last year while making final arrangements with my colleagues for attending the PDC 2008. My two colleagues and I were strongly recommended the "Oslo": Building textual DSLs session by our company's Chief Software Architect. Before that, I've learned a little bit about DSLs by reading some of the chapters of Martin Fowler's DSL Book WIP (work in progress). I liked the idea of DSLs very much and was eager to see and attend all of the PDC 2008 "Oslo" sessions.

I attended three of the "Oslo" sessions then and also talked with development team at "Ask-the-experts" night (Chris Andersen and Doug Purdy were present, too). My strong impression was that it is definitely a powerful concept and it is worth learning, but I didn't not get a clear idea of how to put all this into a working business application. I also asked some of the "Oslo" team members during "Ask-the-experts" nights about intended use and whether Microsoft will build some DSLs for common domains like finance, insurance, etc., but answer I got was that "developer's community" is expected to build DSLs. All in all, I left L.A. a bit confused about "M" and "Oslo", but still with strong interest in the technology.

A year had passed since and I didn't follow "Oslo" related news really, until yesterday I read this article by Kraig Brockschmidt. After reading the article I've finally decided to try and learn "Oslo", build a simple DSL, build a runtime for it and execute an application.

The aspects I'm really interested with "Oslo" are:

• Ease of model use in .NET applications
• Ease of reuse of models/DSLs
• Flexibility, change management, model extensions, etc.
• How will this increase developer productivity?