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Microsoft details Oslo's modeling language, tools


By David Worthington


 David Worthington
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October 10, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Nearly a year after announcing it, Microsoft has begun to lift the covers on its “Oslo” initiative. Today, the company disclosed details about the modeling language and modeling tools that anchor Oslo.

Oslo is a multiyear, multiproduct effort to develop new technology for customers to build, deploy, design and manage composite applications. At its core, Oslo consists of Microsoft “M,” an XML-based modeling language, and “Quadrant,” a visual modeling tool for Visual Studio.

M is a general-purpose language that is designed to help developers integrate models across domains. Parsing and lexing constructs enable M to translate Domain-specific languages (DSL) such as BPMN, BPEL and UML to lower-level formats that runtimes understand, explained Robert Wahbe, a Microsoft corporate vice president.

Visual Studio 2010 will provide IntelliSense code competition for creating models textually, he said.

“I don't see any reason that someone couldn't tie together EMF [metafile] and M in a way that could be used as a basis for model-based tools in the Eclipse framework. As Microsoft gets more and more serious about ALM and non-.NET applications that run on Windows, why shouldn't they reach out to the Eclipse community?” senior Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond wrote in an e-mail.

Models may also be shared using Quadrant, a visual designer for Visual Studio that configures domain-specific views of models. Microsoft will provide views for databases, Web services and workflows, but will rely upon its partners to tackle vertical DSLs, Wahbe said.

While Microsoft expects that most models will be expressed in text, Quadrant is geared toward more complicated models that require developers to work visually, he said. “It is hard to share models with just one,” Wahbe explained. “Other tools conflate modeling and pictures.”

Microsoft will standardize M to ensure that it has widespread industry adoption, he said, without saying what that process would be or which standards body would oversee it. Microsoft joined the Object Modeling Group last month.

By default, models that are written in DSLs are serialized from the Oslo repository into XAML, which Microsoft will use as its markup language and the executable model for the .NET framework, Wahbe said. “.NET executes XAML as a first-class citizen, and there is internal consistency for developers to leverage.”


Related Search Term(s): modeling, Visual Studio, XML, Microsoft

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