New SOA Platform and Language from MS

From eWeek: Microsoft, which in October officially announced its intent to support model-driven development in a broad strategy known as "Oslo," is beginning work on a new declarative programming language called "D," a supporting editing tool and other components of the initiative, according to sources close to the company.

Microsoft announced Oslo as part of an amorphous vision for simplifying application development, design, management and deployment. Company officials said Oslo will represent a core set of technology investments that will encompass both a services infrastructure — spanning server, client and the Internet "cloud" — and an executable modeling platform that will include a general-purpose modeling language, tools and repository....

In a talk at the Lang.NET conference on the Microsoft campus on Jan. 30, Don Box, an architect in Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, said that Microsoft engineers "care deeply about having natural ways to write things down in a text file that are not only natural to write, but more importantly, natural to read."

The Connected Systems Division is working on D and Intellipad, sources said. However, other groups within Microsoft, including the Developer Division, are working on different components of the Oslo strategy.

For more on the new Services-Oriented platform and declarative programming language, see eWeek.