Sep 10 2008   2:04PM GMT

Microsoft joins OMG – Muglia sees mainstream modeling

Posted by: YuvalShavit
Architecture and the SDLC, General Microsoft news

Microsoft Corp. said it will join the Object Management Group, the steward of UML and promoter of Model-Driven Architecture and other enterprise standards. Microsoft’ Bob Muglia made the disclosure as he described Microsoft’s plans to take modeling into mainstream industry use.

In some camps, Microsoft’s reluctance to join OMG has been seen as a carry-over from the old object technology wars, which often pitted the OMG-backed CORBA object request broker against Microsoft’s DCOM. A thaw in Microsoft’s attitude toward OMG seemed apparent earlier this summer when outgoing Gates said that UML will be part of Visual Studio 10.

The move to modeling at Microsoft has been on-going for some time. Four years ago, in one of his first speeches as the company’s ‘chief software architect,’ Gates sang the praises of Model-Driven Architecture, although his company’s efforts to date have centered on domain-specific models, often to the detriment of more universal ‘unifying’ models.

More on the modeling front should be known at PDC, where Microsoft’s Oslo modeling roadmap will be unveiled. Oslo is expected to include a general-purpose modeling language, role-specific modeling tools, a shared model repository, and a distributed service bus. In a recent PluralSight post, Microsoft architect Don Box said the company is 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,” writes Box.