Making ‘Oslo’ a destination
Microsoft works on new programming language as key part of SOA strategy
By Darryl K. Taft IN REDMOND, WASH. were a city, D would be the domain experts. Division, are working on
In october, micro- key to Oslo. Meanwhile, accenting D different components of
soft unveiled “Oslo,” A c c o r d i n g t o t h e will be a new editing tool the Oslo strategy.
the company’s broad sources, D is a new lan- known as Intellipad. Intel- Meanwhile, whensome
SOA strategy that officials guage under develop- lipad will serve as a text Microsoft bloggers began
said will touch on multi- ment at Microsoft that is editor for D and will fur- referring to an Emacs.Net
ple product areas ranging aimed at building appli- ther support the develop- effort late last year and
from servers to services to ment of applications and earlier this year, Burley
development tools. At the other content for the Oslo Ka wasaki, director of
time, little if any core tech- Microsoft’s repository. product management in
nology for Oslo had been modeling Although Intellipad is Microsoft’s Connected released. However, that is targeted primarily for use Systems Division, issued
starting to change. tools will be with D, it will be capable of a statement.
Microsoft engineers are as simple supporting other declara- “The recent reference to
beginning work on a new tive languages, sources a possible ‘ Emacs.net-like’
declarative programming as using the said. Intellipad is being environment is referring
language, a supporting edit- company’s designed to be both cus- to some of the R&D efforts
ing tool and other compo- Excel tomizable and suitable we’re exploring that would nents, according to sources for scripting. The technol- help enable model-driven
close to the company. spreadsheet. ogy also is known inside development to enter
Microsoft announced Microsoft as Emacs.Net, mainstream use by the
—ROBERT WAHBE
Oslo as part of an unde- in homage to the Emacs developer community,”
fined vision for simplifying text editor made popular Kawasaki said.
application development, in Unix. “While it’s too soon to
design, management and announce any specifics in
deployment. ‘Natural’ text terms of product offerings,
Company officials said “[microsoft engineers] this generally referred to
Oslo represents a core set care deeply about hav- some of the early think-of technology investments ing natural ways to write ing we’re doing around
that will encompass both a things down in a text file Oslo’s modeling platform
services infrastructure— that are not only natural currently in development
spanning the server, client to write but, more impor- at Microsoft, specifically
and Internet “cloud”—as tantly, natural to read,” focused on how develop-well as an executable mod- said Don Box, an architect ers will want to edit and
eling platform that will cations and components in Microsoft’s Connected createdeclarativemodels,”
include a general-purpose for the Oslo repository. Systems Division, at the he said.
modeling language, tools However, D is but one Lang.Net conference on In his Lang.Net talk,
and a repository. piece of a much-larger the Microsoftcampushere Box emphasized Micro-
However, the sources puzzle that will include Jan. 30. soft’s need to focus more
said that at the heart of the graphical modeling tools The Connected Systems on declarative program-Oslo initiative lies a new and other components. Division is working on D ming.
declarative programming D is expected to be a tex- and Intellipad, sources In declarative program-language currently known tual m odeling langu age s a i d . H o w e v e r, o t h e r ming, the developer focuses
simply as “D.” If, as the suitable for use by busi- groups within Microsoft, on the “what” rather than
code name implies, Oslo ness professionals and including the Developer the “how” of a process. A
