Microsoft D Latest Piece of Oslo Initiative

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 02/21/08

As part of its broad Oslo initiative, Microsoft is developing a new declarative programming language, code-named "D," that is expected to serve as a textual modeling language that will let business managers and non-technical stakeholders manipulate digital assets.

The users working with these components would do so within the forthcoming Oslo repository to model and craft complex, service-enabled applications, according to industry observers.  Details of Microsoft's plan for D are vague, but Don Demsak, a Microsoft MVP and XML expert, said he believes both the D language and Oslo will be featured at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.

"The D Language is the reason why the PDC was canceled last year," Demsak said. "All I know is that [Microsoft has] been very, very quiet about the D Language. I'm hoping to see more at the MVP summit, but I really don't hold out much hope for the language, if they have gone towards making it data driven."

Microsoft began talking in October 2007 about the Oslo project, which aims to extend the company's Dynamic IT strategy. Oslo will offer tools and resources to help enterprises better plan, model, develop, and deploy applications and services. Aspects of the program are driving new versions of Visual Studio, BizTalk Server, and the .NET Framework. Microsoft has stated that Oslo will include a central repository of digital assets and enterprise code.

"We are building a general-purpose modeling language, tools and repository to bridge all the models within an application, moving models to the center of application development," Microsoft states in backgrounder for the Oslo initiative. "Models will no longer just describe the application, they will be the application."