Oslo: How 'Easy' Is Easy? Time has come for the new modeling platform.

Microsoft is working to make distributed computing easier and to make building distributed applications easier. The software giant is driving toward this goal via software modeling and its new “Oslo” platform. The company will be providing an early look at the first Oslo deliverables at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.

I have been tracking the development of "Oslo" platform in my blogs and now it is ready for prime time according to Microsoft. It is going to be different than UML (the traditional way of modeling) and based on the information from Microsoft, teh Microsoft technical fellow Brad Lovering says "if you know Microsoft's Access application, you will be right at home using the new Oslo tool to create applications.

Oslo is aimed at power users and analysts and it lowers the boundary to build applications. With Oslo, there is going to be a new modeling language as well and PDC will have sessions that demonstrate how to build Domain Specific Languges and how to "apply your DSL to create an interactive text editing experience" according to Microsoft. The industry has tried to make development easier for years and it remains to be see how Oslo will change the languge. The good news is that DSL is beeing recognized and DSM (domain-specific modeling) has been discussed for quite a while in different communities. Verticalization on given domains is the way to go, there is no question about it.

Mary-Jo Foley (author of Microsoft 2.0) adds Live Mesh, a software development kit (SDK) as part of teh new things that Microsoft is launching at PDC. According to Mary-Jo Foley, both Live Mesh and Oslo purport to be all about Software+Services and this is what will be one of the biggest changes and challenges that Microsoft partners will undergo the upcoming months and years. Business models in software are changing, there is no question about it.


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