Microsoft's Distributed Destination: Oslo

Model Behavior

To that end, the team looked to one of Microsoft co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates’ favorite subjects—software modeling—for help.

Lovering set off in 2003 to begin work on a software modeling platform, code-named Oslo, which would enable users to create applications from models. That same year Gates began talking in earnest about Microsoft’s plans to support modeling more directly in its products.

Oslo is one of the ways Microsoft will simplify development of distributed applications for the cloud.

“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,” said Shewchuk. “So Oslo is going to play an incredibly pivotal role. In a sense, think of it as the—I mean this in a most general way—next-generation compiler that takes the ideas that are in the developer’s head and brings them to this new distributed world.”

Microsoft announced Oslo last October and plans to share the first CTPs (Community Technology Previews) of the Oslo deliverables at the Microsoft 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.

Don Box, a partner architect at CSD who is working on the Oslo language stack, joined Oliver as the first two CSD members to move over and begin work on Oslo beyond Lovering’s initial designs. Box described the overall effort: “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.”

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