Microsoft “Oslo”

Microsoft has always been a big player in the SOA space and their products: .NET (WF, WCF), BizTalk and IT management solutions together provided a compelling SOA vision. However the market for building “services” has been evolving at a very fast pace, traditional SOA based methodologies just does not make the cut when developing S+S and cloud services let alone managing the ever changing business scenarios that services were being developed and deployed. In response to this dynamic market Microsoft had announced Oslo (in Nov 2007) –their future platform for building SOA solutions, initially it seemed like just a buzz word/ hype Microsoft was introducing to the market but in the past few months Microsoft has been doing some serious work around it.

But first what is “Oslo”? Interestingly Oslo is not a product. It’s more of an umbrella term consisting of several Microsoft products that simplify the process of design, building, deploying and managing service oriented solution for a vast scenario of end user consumption be it within the intranet or over the cloud services.
Olso encompasses the following technologies
• Microsoft Visual Studio “10”
• Microsoft System Center “5”
• BizTalk Server “6”
• BizTalk Services “1”
• Microsoft .NET Framework “4”

As can be seen in the list the only new product is the BizTalk Services (currently in CTP) which is Microsofts offering for building an Internet Service Bus (ISB). However recently Microsoft has also announced that they are working on a new declarative programming language called ‘D’ which is part of Oslo wave.

So is Oslo really old wine in a new bottle? Far from that – Oslo is really a revolution in software design. Its really a platform that will help us build services keeping in mind paradigm shift:
• Tools: Moving from Imperative to Declarative development
• Development process: Moving from code(ing) to assembling software from models and existing assets (aka a composition/ composite modeling approach)

The fundamental shift in Oslo will be Model Driven Development (MDD) approach, Microsoft in the past had made some investments in this space with the Domain Specific Language (DSL) and Software factory initiatives (Visual Studio GAX and GAT) – we can expect that much of these capabilities will be rolled up to Oslo where business analysts, architects, developers and IT folks will use modeling tools (and possibly the D language) to publish information about the model in terms of requirements and behavior. These models will be stored in a Model repository that can be shared by multiple tools to eventually “assemble” applications. Several vendors in the market have been touting similar initiatives but no one has delivered on the vision. If Microsoft can deliver on the Oslo vision its going to change the way we develop service oriented application.

Its expected that Microsoft will release some of the Oslo wave bits by end of 2008, however you don’t have to wait till the entire suite of Oslo products ship to get a feel for it, you can download the CTP version of BizTalk services today and take it for a spin (in the current CTP, workflows are not supported). Just the compelling idea of an Internet Service Bus and productization of that idea (manifested as BizTalk Services) has fuelled a lot of interest in this space. In the next couple of months we can expect to see lot many pure cloudservice companies building innovate products and services around BizTalk Services.