Just picked up that Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP. Go and grab the bits here and enjoy!

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.

I’m watching the PDC keynote live stream at the moment. I was so impressed and inspired of the content presentment that I couldn't wait to tell you about it. Windows Azure was just announced, and it’s the Windows Operating System for the Cloud (internet). Azure is running upon several datacenters owned by Microsoft around the world (Windows container). This enables Azure to scale and guarantee uptime for your services in the cloud.

So we have this big operation system in the cloud, but what can we do with it? I like to think about Azure as an Operating system. It’s a platform where we can deploy services (WCF, SQL Services, Web applications etc) to the cloud - exactly like we can with a regular Windows OS. And this operating system will guarantee scalability and availability for your services. The .NET platform is also a part of Azure, and this enables you to leverage upon your existing .NET and C# skills.

Imagine you are about to start up a Web 2.0/3.0 company where your business model relay on your services in the cloud. Doing this requires lots of planning and money in order to build datacenters that will scale and handle the load from your users. Do you remember all the problems Twitter had about a year ago, when their services went up and down all the time? Azure has embedded patterns and best practices explored while developing large scale computing systems like Windows Live Search, Windows Live Messenger etc. While building your cloud services upon Azure you can utilize upon a system that will scale and be available.

Imagine how easy it will be to develop the next generation of Twitter based on .NET that will run upon Azure. You will have a platform that is guaranteed to scale and be available around the globe 24/7. The only think you need to think about is to develop your service and enable it for Azure. This will open a new area of services in the cloud. I think we might see a boom of companies that will base their services on Azure! I can’t wait to see where this is going!

I’m curious about the business model of Azure – how is Microsoft going to earn money on this product?

And I can only imagine what we can achieve with Azure together with Oslo.

You can follow Windows Azure on its public website and the product team blog.

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.