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Microsoft opens 'Oslo' skunk works


By David Worthington
April 29, 2008 — 
Without any fanfare, Microsoft lifted the covers on a prototype composite application technology from its stealthy “Oslo” initiative.

Configuration Service 2.0 is a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service for managing composite applications, is expected to be available on Microsoft’s MSDN Web site this week. The service is a companion to Microsoft’s StockTrader 2.0 SOA sample application, but serves a broader role in the context of Oslo by managing the configuration of loosely coupled services.

Oslo is a multiyear effort to develop new technology that helps customers build, deploy, design and manage composite applications. Its primary objective is to take model-drive development into the mainstream of application development.

Oslo is expected to influence the next generation of Microsoft’s application platform, including BizTalk Server release 6, BizTalk Services release 1, .NET Framework version 4, Microsoft System Center release 5 and Visual Studio release 10—all of those names being provisional.

The company does not expect to ship any deliverables until at least 2009, but customers may use the Configuration Service in production systems under the same support policy that covers the patterns and practices provided by Microsoft’s Platform Architecture Guidance group, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the company’s Connected Systems Division .

Kawasaki said that Microsoft would preview more “blocks, pegs and other usable things” from Oslo to gather feedback from developers. Configuration Service 2.0 is an Oslo prototype for aligning metadata repositories and will feed into the aforementioned technologies, said Kawasaki.

“Configuration Service 2.0 shows that MS is thinking hard about this infrastructure and recognizes that WCF is incomplete without it,” remarked Andrew Brust, a regional director volunteer for Microsoft’s Developer Platform evangelism group and chief of new technology at twentysix New York, a Manhattan-based consultancy.

“The Config [sic] Service looks to be quite rich,” he added. Brust speculated that the Configuration Service could have a strong influence on how the releases tied to Oslo would provide dynamic load balancing. This would be through the use of a common configuration database, despite its origins in the StockTrader.NET effort, which he called a “sort-of skunk works project.”

Gregory Leake, the director of technical marketing in the Microsoft Connected Systems Division, said that Configuration Service 2.0 is, in essence, a container-like service that runs in the Common Language Runtime process to virtualize WCF ServiceHosts.

Configuration Service operates very much like the Internet’s Domain Name System, he explained. It manages all active service endpoints, which it assigns dynamically, and directs its requests to the fastest available nodes.

The WCF ServiceHosts run on multiple nodes to keep operations in sync, and Configuration Service updates live nodes in memory. There is no master repository or architecture for configuration; rather, a service configuration database that has linkages to share across domains is kept on each service domain, said Kawasaki.

A Web-based user interface called ConfigWeb UI provides a central view for monitoring deployed applications and managing hosts the implement the service, but does not manage metadata and cannot log into nodes that do not implement the service, according to Leake.

Configuration Service also provides load-balancing capabilities, Leake explained in a follow-up e-mail. So-called “primary” service endpoints are virtualized in a way that allows clients to direct traffic to a base class that balances requests across running nodes. “This is tied into a notification system that flows through Config [sic] Service Endpoints, such that new nodes join the cluster automatically, and start receiving load and participate in failover,” he added.

Leake noted that Configuration Service is not restricted to WCF and works with non-.NET services as well. The service allows developers to create Connected Service definitions to non-WCF services, and it manages these endpoints in service configuration databases by “showing connections to WebSphere services or other Java-container services, managing connections and load balancing requests, and showing online/offline status of these non-.NET services, or service endpoints,” he wrote.

On the other hand, externally exposed services running within a host that implements Configuration Service are fully accessible to non-.NET and non-Configuration Service clients, and can be utilized by Java clients, he noted.

Brust believes that, with further engineering, the Configuration Service could be used to mash up otherwise siloed departmental services into composite applications. He added that the unified way in which Configuration Service manages the work offers a “nice balance” of loose coupling and integrated management.

“If SOA is to avoid being tomorrow's abandoned acronym, then this kind of engineering will need to nurtured, supported and continually improving,” said Brust.


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