With all the different codenames flying around in the lead up to PDC2008 it is easy to lose track of what’s what. Here’s a quick summary to set you back on course:

Oslo is Microsoft’s upcoming visual modelling tool. It includes Quadrant (the visual part) and ‘M’ (the modelling language, previously referred to as ‘D’). We’ve discussed Oslo in these posts.

Dublin is a set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities that extend IIS (delivered via the next versions of WF and WCF). The aim is improve deployment and increase the ease of scalability. We wrote about Dublin here.

Red Dog is the code name for Microsoft’s cloud offering for Windows Server and SQL Server. It’s been referred to as EC2 for Windows (EC2 being a reference to the Amazon offering). We wrote about Red Dog here.

Hope that helps.

Steve Martin has blogged about the upcoming Oslo CTP to be released at PDC (just 17 days to go).

Here’s the breakdown (straight from his blog):

In less than three weeks, the those attending the PDC will get a first-hand look at the three technologies that make up Oslo:

• A language – codenamed “M” – that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and data models
• A relational repository - that makes models available to both tools and platform components
• A tool – codenamed “Quadrant” – that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

Now, in case those two codenames sound new; they are.  While we’ve talked about both the tool and the language before, today is the first time we’ve publicly referred to them by their codenames: “Quadrant” and “M” which you’ll see reflected in the CTP packaging.

Source: Steve Martin

Note, the language – codenamed ‘M’ – is probably what was previously referred to as ‘D’ by some (we referred to it here).

Mary-Jo has a good summary also.

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Interesting to see the news that Paul Vick (long time VB guru) is moving over to the Oslo team. As Darryl Taft notes, this is telling evidence of how important the Oslo initiative at Microsoft is shaping up to be.

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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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.

Yes, you’ve all heard the Visual Studio 2010 news by now. If not, the you may want to check out the following links:

MS Press Release

Mary-Jo Foley analysis (and note that jQuery is going to be part of VS2008 as well as the MVC downloads – her article is a little unclear)

Joe Wilcox opinion (in which he rightly puts together the links with BizTalk Server 2009 and Oslo as well as a look at how this fits in with the upcoming PDC sessions.

However, the best articles to read are Somasegar’s announcement and this MSDN article. In particular the latter which has some cool screen shots:

There’s also some nice Visual Studio 2010 videos coming over on Channel 9, starting with this 34 min piece from Norman Guadagno covering the key enhancements.

Norman Guadagno: Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

There will be a controlled spilling-of-the-beans over the next few weeks leading up to PDC, however the main point being hammered home in the first few days is the serious focus VS2010 has on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) (Wikipedia explanation here)