William Vambenepe's blog

I just found out that I completly missed some interesting information about Oslo-related efforts at Microsoft. Back in February, Mary-Jo Foley reported on a new modeling language (code-name “D”, apparently) that is part of this initiative. And more recently she reported that David Chappell gave a presentation about Oslo (and more generally Microsoft’s SOA plans) at TechEd. He reportedly said that we should expect a new “schema language” (which Mary-Jo thinks is “D”). What I want to know is what its relationship is with SML/SDM and SCA.

Mary-Jo might not know about SCA and SML but I know that David does. He wrote this white paper about SCA and an article arguing that “Microsoft Should Not Support SCA” (based on an a questionable assessment that SCA is only about portability). He and I also had a little back-and-forth about SCA, SML and Microsoft in the comments section of his post. Unfortunately, David hasn’t blogged about Microsoft’s SOA strategy for a while for us non-TechEd people.

In addition to Mary-Jo’s report, the only information I was about to quickly dig out about David’s presentation is this blog post on Microsoft’s Israel site. Looks like David gave the same presentation at TechEd Israel 2008. Anyone who understands Hebrew cares to translate the blog? Fortunately there is a two-minutes video (also available here) in which we can hear David talk (in English). During the second of the two minutes you’ll hear and see something that could come straight out of a SCA presentation…

For some reason, David’s TechEd Israel presentation doesn’t seem to be listed here and TechEd online tells me that “Featured videos are unavailable at this time”. That’s both for IT Professionals and Developers. But of course they forced me to install Silverlight before telling me that.

What would you think of programmers who switch from C to Java in order to be able to use Javadoc for interface documentation? On the one hand, if the benefits of Javadoc alone justify the effort to switch then why not? On the other hand, you can’t help thinking that it’s a pity that they don’t realize (and take advantage of) all the other improvements they are getting for switching to Java. Especially if they start to rewrite some of their existing C code in Java in a way that smells more like C than real Java. Wouldn’t you want to sit with them for a talk?

Well, I am seeing early signs of this happening with SML. As I wrote earlier, the main difference between CIM and SML is that of usage model. Unlike CIM, SML is designed to enable desired-state management. That’s the real difference. But it also happens that SML is XML-based (and naturally compatible with document exchange types of interactions, be they Web Services or REST) while CIM is not (and its XML form is unusable in practice for anything other than RPC). And the difficulty of doing XML doc exchange with CIM happens to be a more immediate problem to many people than desired-state management. As a result, it is tempting to look at SML as a solution to CIM’s lack of XML friendliness. But moving to SML for this reason, while keeping the same level of granularity and the same usage model, is just like moving from C to Java for the Javadoc.

Moving to SML because it is defined around XML documents is hard to justify. BTW, moving to SML because it’s based on XSD is even worse, as I’ll explain in the next post.