Driving Toward D
A couple of weeks ago, blogger (and sometime
RDN contributor) Mary Jo
Foley at
All About Microsoft wrote about a
new
programming language in the works from Redmond codenamed "D."
D is a "textual modeling language" that's integral to Microsoft's
ambitious Oslo initiative, which RDN has previously
covered. Oslo aims to enable Microsoft's dynamic IT strategy by offering
tools and resources to help enterprises better plan, model, develop and deploy
applications. Oslo is extremely wide-ranging, with aspects of the program driving
new versions of Visual Studio, BizTalk Server and the .NET Framework. It'll
be 2009 before Oslo actually arrives.
Critical to Oslo is the repository, which will be the central store of digital
assets of the enterprise. Access and manipulation of this repository will be
enabled, at least in part, by the declarative D programming language. The intent
is for business managers and non-technical stakeholders to be able to use D
to perform modeling activities.
Don Demsak, a Microsoft MVP and XML expert, thinks we may see a coming-out
party for both D and Oslo at the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers
Conference (PDC) in October.
"The D Language is the reason why the PDC was cancelled last year,"
Demsak said. "All I know is that they [Microsoft] have 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 toward making
it data-driven."
So far, Oslo and D have been flying somewhat under the radar, despite the enormously
broad scope of their goals. But we can expect to hear a lot more about these
topics as we get deeper into 2008.
Are you looking forward to Microsoft's model-driven approach to application
development? E-mail me at [email protected].
Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/14/2008