I guess when PDC rolls around in a few weeks and more news around what Oslo is and when the bits roll out to developers and architects to see, touch, feel and smell what the CSD and Dev Division guys have come up with is when the real questions need to be asked. All well and good to speculate, I just hope that some parts of the Oslo effort will touch on some of my desires.

UPDATE: Mike Taulty has posted links to a whitepaper and a screencast that explain more details about .net 4.0

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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.

As it turns out I may not be that far from the truth, or some part of it. Ron Jacobs interviewed David Chappell at Tech.Ed just past and in that conversation David divulges a few interesting bit of information.

Two things that caught my attention was the “Lifecycle Manager” and the “Process Server”.  But here are my two predictions about what these two things could be. (Yes I am going out on a limb)

The Lifecycle Manager – A long running workflow or Saga manager.

The Process Server – A Service Bus implementation.

The video  of Ron Jacobs and David Chappell along with David’s loose timeline/ roadmap to Oslo is after the Jump

endpoint.tv – The Road to "Oslo"

Thanks to Lars Corneliussen for the following

David Chappel also described the release roadmap, but without confirming any exact dates:

1. A CTP Release around PDC (October 27?)
   He didn’t say what that will include.
2. New Workflow Foundation with .NET 4 and a new Visual Studio version
3. The repository including the modeling language and its visual editor + a first part of the process server
4. A more complete version of the process server, including lifecycle manager (whatever that means)

There is nothing left but waiting for the PDC in October. So see you there!

 

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With .net 4 they are not touting it to be a additive release like 3.0 and 3.5.  Wenlog says that 4.0 will be the next major release since 2.0,

• Major improvements for WCF and WF
• Built in dynamic language support
• adding support for a new language (dynamic) for Oslo’s “model driven” programming

But to get the full picture we are going to have to wait for PDC, when the first CTP bits should be available. I can only predict exciting times ahead, as always more things to learn, I guess its time to open Robert Pickering’s book Foundations of F#

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• 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

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