eWeek Describes Vision Behind Oslo

"Microsoft's Oslo tools and language platform is poised to push the company past .NET and into the cloud," according to an eWeek article Microsoft's Distributed Destination: Oslo.

The article describes the thoughts behind Oslo and the advanced thinking that began eight years ago.

"'Advance' may be putting it mildly. The trio thrust Microsoft into a decadelong effort to emerge as a driving force in the world of distributed computing and to push Microsoft’s core enterprise technologies to become prominent in both on-premises environments and what we now refer to as 'the cloud.'"

The vision for Oslo is described in the article, "You don’t want to have to hand-code to what’s going on, on potentially tens of thousands of computers, hundreds of thousands of computers, around the world. ...

"Oslo is a tool, language and a store that basically lets you express your intention, your requirements, what do you want the software to look like. It allows us to capture that as data, and then process that data, including actually being able to execute it, building the application in terms of that data."

Oslo Investments

According to the article, the first CTPs (Community Technology Previews) of the Oslo deliverables will be shown at Professional Developers Conference this October. Those deliverables include an Oslo visual modeling tool that helps to simplify development by enabling users to diagram what their applications will look like, a new declarative modeling language for developers, and a modeling store or repository for managing the models and metadata.

BizTalk Services is the code name for a platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. Currently in active development, BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Workflow, and Identity functionality to enable disparate applications to connect quickly and easily.