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.NET Blog View: What’s all this talk about Oslo and SOA?
In November, Microsoft trotted out a concept piece known as Oslo. Oslo is a bit vague on detail. It seems to comprise any updates to Windows Communication Foundation and BizTalkServer that the company manages to create between now and some rolling point in the future.
But there is more. The Oslo strategy will include some means of general-purpose modeling tools to roll up all the specialized schemas the company has been promising for requirements, operations, and application design. Can you say ‘silos’?
Microsoft has been talking up Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for several years, and suggesting the idea of unified modeling approaches is illusory. The company could have launched a general-purpose modeling approach a long time ago. But UML was the fist take on unified modeling, and it didn’t sit well with the Microsoft crew.
Unified modeling is particularly associated with UML. Now, UML is not the be-all and end-all of anything. It has had a lot of trouble trying to become all things to all people, and the only favorable near-consensus it has gained is for its notation capabilities. If you survey developers you will get a lot of negative feedback on UML, but maybe you should not take it totally to heart. If Microsoft had taken UML ideas and done them better they might be in a better spot today. There was no shortage of UML vendors around that could have been purchased to obtain a let up. Microsoft took its own counsel here. Was brio involved? Was Microsoft looking inward and seeing what it wanted to see?
The most troubling aspect about Oslo is that it is accompanied by the idea of a meta repository. History tells us to bet against such grand schemes.
A long time ago, IBM took up the industry’s attention – and brought down a few third-party endorsers - with the ADCycle repository.
Later, Texas Instruments, Platinum Software, and Computer Associates labored fruitlessly on an all-encompassing Microsoft repository.
IBM, Oracle and Unisys have been working on a standard repository long enough for most people to lose interest. The folks building this have also been pushing model-driven architecture for a few years now – something else that Microsoft seems ready to endorse if it is called “Oslo.”
There’s a sneaky feeling here that some Microsoft folk would not be surprised if the promise of a unified meta repository for components went unfulfilled. They read history, don’t they?
Oslo may be an apt name for this project. It’s cold there, right? This thing is going to move glacially. Watching glaciers puts most people to sleep. Again, details are few, and deliverables are undefined. So are delivery dates. We can expect CTPs for some of this in 2008, we are told.
Post a comment. Share your thoughts. Keep in touch. – Jack Vaughan, Site Editor
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