At the end of last year I took most of December off to finish a book (you'll never guess the topic...), and even had a couple of weeks' holiday. I've now finally shovelled my way through the snow (30cm in the last few days), email, spam, and urgent to-do's and found my desk -- and blogging software -- again. Hope you enjoyed the break :-).

By skipping off early last year, I managed to miss blogging about the actual release of MetaEdit+ 4.5, and our rather special offer to go with it. You can read more about the new release in my earlier entry on the pre-release, or on our web pages. For me, the real highlights are the massive number of extensions to the generator tools and language, the openness of integration via XML models and metamodels or the SOAP API, and the cool new symbols and constraints the metamodeler can build.

Others might also get excited about the graphical metamodeling, but I won't 'cos I didn't build it ;-). What is cool about it is that anybody can make their own metamodeling language. Stop and think about that for a minute: not only can you build your own modeling tool without coding, now you can build your own metamodeling tool without coding. There are so many people coming up with their own metamodeling tools at the moment we thought we just had to help them out :-). Those who get their kicks out of bootstrapping will also be tickled to see that our graphical metamodeling language is of course built in itself...

Back to the release, and its rather special offer. Yes, you really can get your very own full copy of MetaEdit+ Workbench for just 150 EUR. This price is, of course, crazy: we know it's worth far more than that. With this offer we want to make sure that nobody misses out on finding out just how much value MetaEdit+ can offer. You thus get one cheap license for yourself or your organization, to prove in your own time and on your own domain that any standard licenses you buy will more than pay for themselves.

Other than the limit of one per customer, there are no strings attached. This is, however, intended as a special offer to accompany the official releasing of 4.5, so it's probably not going to be available for long. Already, we've seen a large number of takers, bigger than anyone here imagined, and more surprisingly the numbers aren't tailing off even after two months. At some point, hard business realities are going to step in, so my advice is: if you're interested, grab one now!