I wonder who invents these codenames… according to this Mary Jo Foley post, Microsoft’s future modeling language, a part of the Oslo initiative, and which will most certainly change the lives of those who work in the integration space, is [coded]named “D” [note that there’s already a D programing language].
D will be a declarative language aimed at non-developers, and will be based on eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML), sources, who asked not to be named, said.
I guess this explains one of the (NDA’d) presentations we had at last year’s MVP Summit, by the man now titled %u00abMicrosoft’s Chief Modeling Officer%u00bb, Don Box.
The discussion thread following this post is already very long, and several of the posts either raise problems with modeling/higher abstraction, and others just complain about “yet another language“. On my personal opinion, it makes perfect sense to have new languages that are good at new, specific tasks. I’m still now sure, for example, that bringing LINQ to C# is good, in terms of aspects like language-cluttering and database-coupling, but most of the time these aspects are neglected in discussions of LINQ. On the other hand, in this SOA world of today, I think it COULD make sense to have a “service-oriented language”, with primitives to send/receive messages, define message schemas, handle service/message versioning, governance, deployment, logging and monitoring built into the language itself.
So my take in this is: go D! 🙂 I’m looking forward to try it out and see how far it can be pushed. It it can help me do more in less time, I’m all for it.