Oslo and Live Mesh: Will the two platforms ever meet?
As the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) inches closer, Microsoft is making public more details about two of the new platforms that will be the big news.
One of these is Live Mesh, a software development kit (SDK) for which is expected to be one of the major deliverables that developers will get to start dabbling with around the time of the PDC. The other is Oslo, Microsoft's modeling platform, pieces of which will be available to testers in Community Technology Preview (CTP) form around the same time.
Live Mesh is definitely a consumer-focused platform, while Oslo is aimed primarily at business-focused developers and customers. But the pair share a number of commonalities, too.
Both Live Mesh and Oslo purport to be all about Software+Services. Both are expected to take advantages of advances in distributed/parallel computing. And both seem to build on top of a set of building block services -- things like federated identity, connectivity/messaging, storage, etc.
I've been assuming that the building block services behind Live Mesh were the same ones as those underlying Oslo. The building-block services layer in Oslo is known as "Zurich." John Shewchuk, a Technical Fellow in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, is the point person on Zurich.
Shewchuk is giving a talk at the PDC, entitled "A Lap Around Building Block Services." From the description of his talk, it sounds as if my asumption may not be off-base. From the description of Shewchuk's PDC session:
"From consumer-targeted applications and social networking web sites to enterprise class applications and services, the building block services make it easy for you to give your applications and services the most compelling experiences and features."
Does this mean that Red Dog, the base layer of Microsoft's cloud/datacenter operating system, also is part of both the Live Mesh and Oslo platforms? Based on a slide Microsoft provided during its introduction of Live Mesh, I wouldn't be surprised if the Live Mesh "cloud infrastructure services" and "storage infrastructure" components also figure into the Oslo picture somehow.
I guess we won't know for sure how and if the Live Mesh and Oslo platforms will meet until late October. Until then, new tidbits about Microsoft's next-generation platforms will continue to trickle out. Here are a few recent ones for your reading pleasure:
Oslo:
- Microsoft joins OMG and officially backs UML, BPMN
- More on Microsoft's forthcoming D modeling language
- Microsoft architect Don Box: What is Oslo?
- Microsoft product unit manager Doug Purdy: Another definition of Oslo
- Microsoft renames next rev of BizTalk; older versions will work with new Oslo components
- Wenlong Dong: .Net 4.0: An early preview of what to expect
Live Mesh: