With all the Visual Studio 2010 announcements and hoo-hah you may be wondering what the fuck this Oslo thing is they keep referring to. Don’t worry, you’re not alone – we’re all confused here at Microsoft Confidential too.

Hoping for some relief we turned to Darryl Kaft who has a good overview. Then to Don Box, the main man at Oslo HQ, who gives his thoughts here:

We’re building “Oslo” to simplify the process of developing, deploying, and managing software. Our goal is to reduce the gap between the intention of the developer and the actual artifacts that get deployed and executed. The approach we’re taking is to move more of the definition of an application into the world of data, where we (and you) can more easily make queries as to the developer’s original intent.

Clear as  mud right? He goes on:

With Oslo, we’re doing two things:

1. We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.

2. We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.

Thankfully though, we then stumbled onto the Microsoft SOA site.

Basically, it seems Oslo is a visual modelling tool that stores the details in SQL Server so you can query against it. Microsoft’s D Language sits in there somewhere too.

A few screen shots and some clear explanation would have been nice, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until PDC to get the lowdown.