• Google joining the Open Invention Network.
• RhinoETL what / why?
  
• Behaviour Driven Development.
• What is it / anyone doing it?
  
• .Net Library for BDD - Behaviour #
• Open sourcing your own products?
• When, if etc.
• Convincing shareholders/stakeholders.
• Affects on publicity, marketing.
• What's happening at the day of code (dev code camp).
• Lightspeed goes to v1.0.
• Sql Server 2008 improvements

• Lots of stuff doesn't work just yet ;o)
• it will end up on Rubyforge, not Codeplex... and I think it's quite an appropriate decision considering the nature of the project... good to see common sense winning over marketing dogma - and it's going to be there by the end of August.
  
• The project will eventually be entirely open to community contributions (I don't think that includes the code making up the DLR itself, as a shared platform that's probably something that needs to be tightly controlled)
  

So I see both Andrew, Nick and Alex J have some thoughts on languages, and of course Rowans post sparked it off... and people talk about beautiful languages, mentioning expressiveness in the same breath. 

Personally I love how expressive Ruby is - I think potentially because I got my first exposure to ruby after reading Why's poignant guide a while back (I see there are new chapters ...oooh) which was quite surreal compared to how I say learnt C++ (from reading the Borland Turbo C++ manual when I was 11, also my first exposure to OOP)...

When I code in ruby I feel like I'm telling stories... I dig that :)

So Alex J mentioned that extension methods let us achieve much of the syntactic sugar that ruby provides (though obviously in ruby's case this isn't so much syntactic sugar as core mechanisms in the language itself) - and of course Lambda expressions are helping too, but does expressive == good 100% of the time?   I don't think I'm qualified to say, but I can't help but feel that a language which is very expressive, isn't necessarily the easiest to manipulate and refactor, so I may not be as productive and it may not feel as fluent to me... I quite liked this resharper horizons post which suggests that tooling support should probably influence future language design - could that requirement possibly fight against an increased level of expressiveness in a language, will compromises need to made, or is nirvana just around the corner?

OK, well I figured this post should at least have some code... I'd feel uneasy otherwise... so how about:

public static class CommonExtensions

{

    public static Action<Action<int>> LoopTo(this int start, int end)

    {

        return new Action<Action<int>>(action => To(start, end).ForEach(i => action(i)));

    }

    public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end)

    {

        if (end < start)

            for (int i = start; i > end - 1; i--)

                yield return i;

        else

            for (int i = start; i < end + 1; i++)

                yield return i;   

    }

    public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> sequence, Action<T> action)

    {

        foreach (T item in sequence) action(item);

    }

    public static void PrintLine(this object o)

    {

        Console.WriteLine(o);

    }

}

So now we could try and do this....

// ruby

(10..20).each { |i| puts i }

// C#

10.LoopTo(20) ( i => i.PrintLine() );

So Catch Ltd (one of DevDefined's partners) turned 3 today, and there was a few birthday celebrations  this evening.  Not only was it an opportunity for me to establish my supremacy in the role of worst ten pin bowler, but it was I think one of the first times the entire Catch team actually got to the meet each other - considering the type of work Catch does (providing QA, BA & PM resources primarily, generally on-site) it's actually pretty rare for everyone to be in one place at the same time!

It's been great to watch a company that started off effectively with just the Managing Director Bryce Day 3 years ago reach a size where you can't even fit all the employees into a meeting room any more, with new roles being created on an almost weekly basis, exciting times ahead for Catch I would say!

Great work Bryce, and all the Catch Staff - keep up the great work!

And for anyone looking for a company which can provide highly skilled and talented PM, BA or QA resources or end-to-end software development leveraging the skill sets in both Catch Limited and DevDefined then why not drop Catch an email?

So I've tidied up the source for the DSL from my last post a little... though my "test" was to represent a DSL similar to the one Ayende displayed in Brail - I haven't implemented any monorail view engine integration, there's little point I feel, I was more interested in being able to display a nested DSL-like syntax, and parse the necessary information out of it as required. 

You can grab it from SVN repository here (edit: I've now fix the PROPFIND proxy issue, so the link should work)

At any rate, probably the most interesting example is the one that takes this code:

var people = new List<Person>()

{

    new Person() { FirstName = "Alex", LastName = "Henderson"},

    new Person() { FirstName = "Joe", LastName = "Bloggs"}

};

var compDsl = new ComponentDsl();

compDsl.Add

(

    GridComponent => compDsl.Component

    (

        compDsl.Parameters

        (

            source => people

        ),

        header => compDsl.Section

        (

            tr => compDsl.As

            (

                th => compDsl.As

                (

                    compDsl.Text("Names")

                )

            )

        ),

        item => compDsl.Section

        (

            tr => compDsl.As

            (

                td => compDsl.As

                (

                    compDsl.Item<Person>(p => p.FirstName + " " + p.LastName)

                )

            )

        )

    )

);

var dsl = new StandardDsl();

dsl.Add

(

    html => dsl.As

    (

        body => compDsl

    )

);

And converts it to this xhtml...

<html>

  <body>

    <table>

      <tr>

        <th>Names</th>

      </tr>

      <tr>

        <td>Alex Henderson</td>

      </tr>

      <tr>

        <td>Joe Bloggs</td>

      </tr>

    </table>

  </body>

</html>

You can pretty quickly figure out what's going on by placing a breakpoint on the Execute() method of the StandardDsl class and tracing through all the calls - in essence all the nodes are emitted by calling the top-level Batch delegate which causes a recursive call down the "tree", with the information being emitted as a side-effect to an evaluation scope.

Though I used nodes - effectively creating a structure that's easier to parse, there's no reason why you couldn't make immediate calls to some kind of object, avoiding the need for a second round of parsing - the only trick is that you'd still need to use some kind of scoped stack to push/pop the names of the components because in a statement like this:

dsl.As

(

    GridComponent => dsl.Component

    (

      // etc. etc.

    )  

)

the call to dsl.Component needs some way to inspect the stack of names and pull "GridComponent" off the top.

I'd love to hear from anyone who could see a use for this kind of thing... it'd be nice to get a more realistic example... I'm struggling to think of anything practical myself.