This article is more than 1 year old

Microsoft wants open-source recruits for new model army

Blinded by the Silverlight

Microsoft has a lot of work ahead of it

Oslo is Microsoft's second big push into the model-driven development field. It follows the launch of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, where Microsoft fully embraced DSLs as a way to build applications using less code and that take less time.

Unfortunately, while models are a nice theory many coders tend to see them as something for the architects on their teams so they don't get as widely adopted as they could.

That was OK in 2005 when Microsoft was just another tech vendor with a model-driven application development strategy, just like IBM with it's backing for the Rational Unified Process and Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Three-years later there's a new urgency. The industry is focused on rich-internet applications (RIA), cloud computing, data centers, and software as a service.

Microsoft wants developers to start modeling web services using WS-* along with XAML, which provides the Windows look, feel, and integration as XAML is also used to write applications in Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Hence the release under OSP. If you don't use WS-* - and let's face it, WS-* has fallen out of favor as a vendor-driven vehicle while developers have seized on Representational State Transfer (REST) - then OSP at least means you can use M with other specs.

To get an idea of how big this is, consider Microsoft's browser-based media player Silverlight. The player uses a lightweight subset of XAML and WPF, and while much of the fuss around Silverlight has been video streaming, Microsoft also sees Silverlight as a serious business platform. Silverlight can be used in new ways to present data visually and using interaction.

Microsoft's had Silverlight on an accelerated delivery program since people have been lapping up Silverlight and RIAs are in fashion.

Companies such as presentation-layer specialist and Microsoft partner Infragistics see the potential. Infragistics this week expanded its NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization portfolio by adding components for map, timeline, and zoombar as CTPs. These follow on from chart and gauge.

As noted, though, these are early days. Infragistics notes its Microsoft customers are still largely using Silverlight in evaluation mode.

Also, Microsoft's got a huge cultural hill to climb in convincing developers to use Oslo. Purdy clearly thinks it's about self-awareness: making developers realize they are already swimming in a world of models by using things such as XML. They just need to make the connection.

Privately, though, one respected Microsoft programming guru told The Reg that Microsoft's got a lot of work ahead of it talking to people and convincing them to model. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like