Oslo has been shrouded in a lot of mystery. Most information on the about Oslo is still speculation. When people think Oslo they think

• Biztalk V Next
• Emacs.net
• Microsoft ESB
• All of the above and more…

IMHO I believe it to be everything and more, but what proof did i have to support it? Well Doug Purdy announced on his blog about hiring for Emacs.net This raises the question of why another IDE/Text Editor when Visual Studio is very powerful, unless you have tried working with XAML. I digress.

Last night there was posts from Doug Purdy and Don Box that began to unveil bits of what make Oslo.

Doug Describes it as three simple things.

• A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner
• A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models
• A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

and Don says that Olso is being created with a couple of intentions

1. We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.

2. We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.

Based on this I would take a punt and say that Oslo is going to create a platform for developers to create DSL’s that will be stored in a repository, this DSL is then retrieved and consumed by a visual tool to create on the fly mash-ups of their domain. The key part here is that the visual tool will be something that can be used by Information Workers, Business Analysts, and Project Consultants.

I imagine it to be a tool that enables these Information Workers to use some of Oslo’s features much like using Visio, but instead of static elements there are dynamic objects drawn from the repository that perform a specific business purpose, when put together by the domain expert enables them to perform a task that would have required a developer to perform otherwise.

This is something that is peeking my interest. Wow I can imagine every medium to large business needing something like this. I cant wait for PDC anymore, I just wish I could be there, then again that’s what a Webcast is for.

Doug calls this the “end of the beginning” of his vision of enabling everyone to be a programmer if they can pull something like this of then he may be correct. But I will wait and hold my judgement till I can play with the Bits that should be available at PDC08