Microsoft Oslo is soon to be announced at PDC and I’ve found out that they have opened their developer center at MSDN web site and I just wanted you to give you this link. I also wanted to share my thoughts on what I think “Oslo” is all about.

Imagine a world where data would drive your applications. Not classes, services nor assemblies, but the actual content of your application. Excel is a good example of this, you create a new spreadsheet and start adding data and structure it (moddeling) in various ways. Then you begin to summarize and add more advance features into your spreadsheet. And if you think about it, what really drives the Excel spreadsheets is the data you add into it. What if we could develop applications in the same manner? Where we let the data drive the structure of the application (metaprogramming). I think this is Microsoft’s respond to Domain Driven Design.

Today when we are developing application based on .NET we have two separate worlds. We have the compile- and run-time world of the application. Compile-time is where we define and structure of the application using classes and assemblies. Then we compile it and run it, in this world we have interconnected objects that communicates with each other. These objects load data from databases, web services, the file system etc, they interact with the user and they also process data based on the logic of the domain we are in. As a young developer it is hard to differentiate and understand these two completely different worlds. I hope Oslo can balance this, and open up our mind for domain modelling and Domain Driven Design.

“Oslo” contains a textual modeling language called M, a visual modeling tool called Quadrant and a repository for managing Domain Models. I think the models will be stored inside a SQL Server database.

Imagine a future where you can define your model in a textual DSL or visual tool. Then adding the data needed to expand your model. And the next level is to scaffold some user interfaces based on the model, and bang! you have a data driven application.

Read more about Oslo on the MSDN Developer Center or at Chris Sells blog.

Happy reading!

I would also like to add that I'm not attending PDC, I'm sitting home monitoring live video streams, twitter and RSS feeds. So some of this information might not be 100 percent correct, it's my interpretation of content gathered from various sources.