Microsoft rechristens Oslo modeling platform

Microsoft has rechristened its Oslo software modeling technology with the new name of SQL Server Modeling and will release a CTP (community technology preview) of the platform that uses the new name next week.

The codename,  Oslo, will no longer be used, a Microsoft representative said.

The CTP, due at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, will feature: The M textual language for defining schemas, queries and domain-specific languages for SQL Server databases; the Quadrant tool for interacting with large datasets stored in SQL Server databases; and Repository, a SQL Server role for secure sharing of models between applications and systems. The components of the CTP will ship with a future version of SQL Server.

In deliberating over Oslo in the past year, Microsoft determined the technology had value when applied to SQL Server, said Doug Purdy, Microsoft software architect, in a blog post on Tuesday.

“Time after time we heard that M would make interacting with the database easier, provided we offered a good end-to-end experience with tools (Visual Studio) and frameworks (Entity Framework and Data Services) that developers use today,” Purdy said. “We heard that developers wanted to use the novel data navigation/editing approach offered by Quadrant to access their data in whatever SQL Server they wanted, not just the Repository.  We heard that the notion of a Repository as something other than SQL Server was getting in the way of our conversations with customers.”

Oslo was revealed in 2007 as a multi-year, multi-product effort to simplify the application development lifecycle by enhancing .Net, Visual Studio, BizTalk, and SQL Server, Purdy said.

“At PDC (Professional Developer Conference) 2008, we announced that various pieces of Oslo were being spun off and shipped in the application server (Dublin), the cloud (.Net Services), and the .Net Framework (WF/WCF 4.0),” Purdy said.

Since then, three community technology previews based on Oslo.

Prior to the 2008 PDC, Microsoft found that customers were confused by using the Oslo name to talk about several technologies including a new version of BizTalk, a new tool and a new workflow engine, Purdy said in an August blog post. The company also found it was possible to roll out Oslo technologies in already-established products rather than creating a separate Oslo “wave,” Purdy said.

Microsoft then decided to use the term “Oslo” to refer just to the modeling pieces of the platform.

This story, “Microsoft rechristens Oslo modeling platform,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development at InfoWorld.com.