This week Microsoft gave details about its plans for Oslo technologies which will be part of the Visual Studio family. Microsoft announced that a preview of Oslo is due in Los Angeles on October 27 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Microsoft wants that through Oslo technologies to make development easier by making models become the applications.  

This way, business analysts could make changes to applications easier than looking at thousands of lines of code. Basically, Oslo makes it simpler to see what an application is trying to do by representing it visually, instead of showing, sometimes, confusing, lines of code.

Microsoft made it clear that its intentions are not to replace code lines, because only one line of code can represent so many things. Visually things will never be so compact. Oslo will be part of the Visual Studio family, though Microsoft didn’t specify what version of the pack will be the one to include Oslo. Microsoft also stated that Oslo will not minimize the role of the developer and that this is just a natural step that has to be taken in the evolution of software development. This means that developers’ jobs won’t be at risk at any time, though some adaptation from their point of view will be needed.

Oslo is believed to reach across all Microsoft platforms making developers create all sort of applications for SharePoint, Live Mesh, basically any Microsoft based platform. Microsoft recently pledged to rejoin the Object Management Group and further support modeling. The fact that Oslo technologies are advancing and are brought to the light little by little shows that Microsoft will respect that pledge.