Microsoft SOA Roadmap

About Oslo

"Oslo” is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction.

“Oslo” consists of: A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner, a language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models , and a relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components.

Oslo advancements

Building on the technology available today, the “Oslo” advancements will be delivered through Microsoft server and tools products in five key areas:

• Tools. New technology planned for Visual Studio “10” will make significant strides in end-to-end application life-cycle management through new tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.

• Server. Microsoft BizTalk Server “6” will continue to provide a core foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.

• Services. BizTalk Services “1” will offer a commercially supported release of Web-based services enabling hosted composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. This release will include advanced messaging, identity and workflow capabilities.

• Repository. There will also be investments in aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets. Microsoft System Center “5,” Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.

Customer benefits delivered by Oslo

• Integrates with what you already have. “Oslo” lets you build on the existing and familiar investments you’re already made in skills and technology on top of the Microsoft SOA platform, while simultaneously opening up a rich new set of capabilities. “Oslo” enhances and aligns BizTalk Server and the .NET Framework and provides significant enhancements across a range of SOA infrastructure services such as federated identity, messaging and long running activities. “Oslo” also enables simplified service enablement and composition of your existing legacy or packaged applications through rich interoperability support delivered through adapters, Web services and Web 2.0 protocols.

• Provides a unified platform for software plus services. “Oslo” further extends the benefits of services into the cloud, by delivering an enterprise-class, unified platform for building both SOA and software as a service (SaaS) applications. This enables our enterprise customers to more easily build composite applications that federate across organizational boundaries, take advantage of new cloud-based services, and provide the flexibility to deploy applications in house, third-party hosted or Microsoft-hosted environments.

• Connects the end-to-end application life cycle. The technical investments that make up “Oslo,” in conjunction with Visual Studio Team System, help further connect business and IT stakeholders across the full application life cycle, by giving new ways to easily develop, deploy, manage and scale applications using integrated tools and application models. This enables managing end-to-end composite applications as a whole system rather than individual pieces. “Oslo” products and technologies will integrate with and enhance Microsoft life-cycle tooling in Visual Studio Team System, System Center and BizTalk Server.

• Advances the software development process. “Oslo” helps provide even greater levels of agility and productivity to both business and IT by taking deep advantage of visual modeling tools; models, in turn, raise the level of abstraction across the system. “Oslo” will greatly simplify the development of composite applications that can be more easily changed, because the underlying model is the application (without handoffs between people or systems involved in the software development life cycle).

Bill Gates: Oslo and the future of application development

At TechEd United States 2008 (June 2008), Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates discussed in his keynote the ways in which modeling would transform the future of application development, and the role that “Oslo” plays in these efforts:

“I think one of the biggest trends in application development that I talked about… is modeling, and we're making a big investment in that. We have what's been code named Oslo, and talked a little bit about it on our Web sites and our blogs, which is this model-driven development platform. It's actually taking the kind of models that you're seeing arising in specific domains, like software management in System Center, or your data design over in SQL, or your process activities over in BizTalk and saying, we need to take all these domains and be able to put them into one model space. In fact, we need to let people create their own domains that aren't just isolated, but that exist in this one modeling space. And that's what Oslo is about.” ... Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft

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