Oslo is Microsoft’s upcoming visual modelling tool (we covered it here a few days back).

Paul announced his move on his blog, and took pains to reassure the VB faithful that he won’t be going too far:

Even though I’ll be spending a good bit of my time on Oslo, though, I’ll still going to be an active member of the VB community. I’ll still be talking about VB on this blog, opining on the language and it’s future, and, I’m sure, continuing to answer lots of questions. I’ll be continuing to use VB and am really excited where the product is going in this release and the next one (but more about that at the PDC!).

Don Box, who looks after the Oslo team, was as succinct as ever over the announcement, providing the following sum total:

Paul just joined my team to work on the Oslo language, specifically the parts covered in this talk.

I can’t put into words how happy I am that Paul signed up to help us birth this baby.

Darryl’s analysis is excellent and there’s nothing much we can add to the subject – just go read his post here.

You can follow Paul on Twitter here.

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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.