the dead parrot

It seems that Microsoft has dropped Oslo and it's focusing on OData and EDM as a more loosely coupled approach to modeling. I was really interested in "M" and creating DSL's in the language, was impressed with Don Box and Doug Perdy at PDC2008 but it seems that we'll have to wait for another fad to occupy our dsl-thirsty minds. Weirdest of all, it seems that Doug also vanished with the Oslo.

Nevertheless, after a few posts on SQL Server Modeling, Oslo, and "M" and a long pause posting, I'm here to write about the next technology I'm trying to learn and apply.
This time it's Python with Google App Engine.This should be a big change after years of using C# and Java in my everyday work. This is somehow weird, because actually I'll still continue to use MS technologies at work, but examining the Google side of development world is like a new hobby.

Right now I'm going through the tutorials and docs on Google code and I really like the language and the approach. Provided services give a lot of power instantly to your applications. You don't have to worry about authentication - authenticate users with Google account, don't worry about the database details and query optimization - just use the easy-to-use Datastore service. Emails, cron jobs, XMPP, Google Apps, all together gives a great platform for development and enable you to focus on your.... Idea!

If you don't have an idea for the next I believe you should try developing an application that you need and you would like to see available. Taken this approach what I miss really is an application to easily organize and track my tasks. I get and assign tasks through several tools, Outlook, issue tracking tools at work, Google tasks, and of course RTM. At the end of day, each application is missing some feature that I think I really need. Thus, I'll try - as an exercise - to start with a task tracking application. Not a great idea, but at least - it could be a real enough project to learn Python and development for Google App Engine.