Microsoft "Oslo"

Microsoft has announced it newest SOA initiative, codenamed Oslo. Here are a few observations I have on this announcement:

Let's start with "what is it?" Well it isn't an "it" per se, since Oslo is a bunch of initiatives within the Microsoft offerings.

For one, it is some of the libraries within .NET 4.0 -- specifically the next versions of WCF and WF.

Secondly, it is a bunch of designers and tools that will be part of Visual Studio (beyond VS 2008).
The most interesting component of Oslo will be a new repository to allow version management of models and services. I guess it is safe to say it will be built upon Team Foundation Server (or a subset of which which will be used by both products).

The last part of the puzzle is of course V.Next of Biztalk and something currently branded as "Biztalk Services '1'". As far as I know Biztalk sells pretty, but I think it is both too bloated (e.g., think about the hardware needed to run this in high-performance solution) and builds on the wrong architecture (hub vs. bus). I hope Microsoft makes major updates this time (Biztalk 2004 to Biztalk 2006 mostly innovated around the business activity monitoring. While that's important I think more work on the engine was/is due).

Biztalk services would offer an implementation of some of the SOA patterns I talk about -- service host, workflodize, etc. -- to provide an infrastructure for building services. The relation between "Biztalk 6" and "Biztalk services 1" is not clear from the information provided by Microsoft; hopefully this is just a branding issue and not a tight relation between the products.

On the upside, one of the key persons working on this is Don Ferguson who, before joining Microsoft, was chief architect for IBM's software group. About a year ago I had the chance to hear him talk about SOA and all I can say is that Don is someone who really knows his stuff.

PS: It's amusing to see the press release talks about "model-driven" approach rather than software factories, but I guess that's just nitpicking.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 07:46 PM  Permalink