I was planning to attend the Microsoft SOA and Businss Process Conference in Redmond this week, but alas personal matters prevented me from being there. I'm sorry I missed it. The keynote address by Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Server & Tools Business, contained a major announcement. He announced an ambitous new program called Oslo. According to the official announcement, Oslo is a set of technical investments that will will unify Microsoft's services and modeling platforms by moving from a world where models describe the application to a world where models are the application.

Oh my gosh! This is nothing short of huge.

Basically Oslo consists of two major initiatives:

• An SOA platform that consists of clients, "on premise" software, and "in the cloud" services. These capabilities will be delivered through BizTalk Server "V6", System Center "V5", Visual Studio "V10", BizTalk Services "V1" and .NET Framework "V4".
• A modeling platform that enables higher level declarative descriptions of an application. I'm assuming that this will be a consolidation of the various Microsoft modeling tools currently available, with the Distributed System Designers playing center stage.

I've been a big fan of modeling as a way to increase productivity of software developers. Although declarative models will never completely replace code, much of what we implement in code today can be done faster and more easily with models. What's more, a model can be used to greatly simply the deployment process because it describes the application in a way that allows the runtime environment to be automatically provisioned.

If Microsoft pulls this one off, it will significantly change the way we build and deploy software. I believe this is called a paradigm shift.