Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/30/microsoft_m_oslo/

Microsoft wants open-source recruits for new model army

Blinded by the Silverlight

By Gavin Clarke

Posted in Software, 30th October 2008 18:11 GMT

PDC Microsoft is reaching out to open-source and adding a dash of RIA bling to its latest model-driven development crusade.

The company has released M, its new programming language for building textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and software models using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) under its Open Specification Promise (OSP).

Specifically, Microsoft has released MSchema, MGrammar, and MGraph. OSP lets third parties implement a Microsoft specification without getting a nasty phone call from the company's lawyers.

Douglas Purdy, Microsoft product unit manager, told the Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) anyone - including the open-source community - can implement the M language, schema, or graph.

"We will work as hard and diligently as we can to engage third parties including the open source community to implement this approach," Purdy said. "We want it [M] to be as broad as XML is today."

Purdy said his team is also evangelizing Microsoft's own product groups to adopt model-driven development using M. The team is talking to the Systems Center and Windows teams to make models for re-use. Five hundred models were released in the SDK for Microsoft's Oslo this week.

Oslo is Microsoft's model-based development strategy for service-oriented architectures (SOAs), which includes M, a tool called Quadrant for building and viewing models visually, and a repository that uses SQL Server.

By releasing M under the same pledge as things such as XAML and the WS-* web services specs, Microsoft is potentially removing any encumbrance on people building models or languages combining XAML, WS-* and M.

That's key for Microsoft, as it's early days in the Oslo story and the company needs industry buy-in. It needs both partners and third parties to build DSLs and models that are ready, off the shelf, to be used by customers running Visual Studio 2010 when it ships.

The "domain" in this case can be horizontal - like an HR application - or vertical, such as a retail management system for the catering sector.

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. ®