Oslo: Road to Microsoft's Cloud: is modeling ready for a larger audience of software engineers?

The road to Microsoft’s Cloud computing environment runs through “Oslo,” the company’s software modeling initiative, but there will be other stops along the way. Steven Martin from Microsoft (senior director of product management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division) explains pretty nicely the misconceptions about modeling and what he feels is going to have to happen in the future.

It is clear to me that software development community will have to take modeling into consideration once again. I have to say that we have failed to deliver on the promises of UML and I am speaking about this with experience of having run development teams in the past. UML is very generic and the notation tries to solve the problems of the whole world and not any given domain like domain-specific modeling (DSM) does. However, based on the article in the eWeek.com, it looks like Microsoft is on the path of creating a modeling environment that is not just models, but executable as well. The reasoning for this is based on an interview of Steven Martin as follows: 

"We have a vision of making model-driven development a mainstream part of application development," Martin said. "To do this we are building a general purpose modeling platform, where we take models out of silos and into a shared representation that can define an end-to-end application."

Also, Microsoft is going to enable third-party developers to integrate with Microsoft model repository and Microsoft is working on a new declarative language that provides developers with an approachable, textual format for authoring models. "This language will also provide deep integration with repository to enable easy import/export of models with the repository, and support interoperability of models between tools and domain specific modeling notations, Steven Martin states." 

And finally, Martin concludes that "that in addition to these innovations that enhance the design-time processes, "we’re also making sure the models are executable -– this is where we deliver true business agility, since the behavior of the running application can be updated simply by updating the models stored in the repository. Models will no longer just describe the application; they will actually be the application. I like to refer to this as sending the model to the server, not the printer…”

I have to say, that it is about time that we get more productivity to software development and the new cloud computing with software assets in the cloud, makes modeling again a must that can not be ignored by software developers, software development tool vendors and also schools that educate new software engineering students.

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