Code Is Obsolete in Visual Studio 10

Sorry, I can’t resist.

Hot off the presses is a new technology planned for Visual Studio 10, Oslo.  It was announced today by the director of Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, Burley Kawasaki (love the name).

Microsoft today unveiled a futuristic vision of technology for service-oriented architecture (SOA) development where “the model is the application.”

“If you can make the model executable,” Kawasaki said, “where the model is the application, then you lose the gaps and handoffs. The model that business defines is the thing that actually executes.”

The next gen tools are supposed to be a form of model-driven development.  It’ll be a mashup of BizTalk Server 6, Visual Studio 10, and System Center.

The Microsoft approach, which will be embodied in the Oslo tooling, is to make modeling a collaborative effort among business analysts, architects and developers and eliminate the coding step.

No more coding?  Looks like I’ll be needing to find a new job.  Apparently the BA’s will be taking my place.

Here’s another viewpoint:

“It’s time to help developers and IT professionals extend the capabilities of SOA to address the new ‘blended’ world of software plus services and cross-boundary collaboration,” said Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. “‘Oslo’ will enable a new class of applications that are connected and streamlined — from design through deployment — reducing complexity, aligning the enterprise and Internet, and simplifying interoperability and management.”

Enterprise internet alignment?  Is that the next big thing? 😉

On a more serious note, if you want to know what’s *really* going to ship, you can read up on Composite Applications.  In a nutshell, take a Component Architecture, convert the components to services, add Business Process Workflow to glue the services together in an Orchestrated fashion, mix in some infrastructure services (such as federated identity), and add a dash of MDA all around.

Of course, then there’s always the other form of Model-Driven Development–where the modeling language is the programming language, but that won’t sell many tools.