Microsoft announced their Oslo Initiative last October at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007. You can read what they said then. I am sure the audience and the timing were right. But since then not a whole lot has been said publicly about Oslo.

The wraps started coming off in June, at the TechEd 2008 Developers Conference. Bill Gates painted some broad strokes in his keynote address. He spoke briefly about rich modeling and how Oslo is about much more than a repository for that modeling data. He announced the next milestone is producing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Oslo in the PDC2008 timeframe this October. (I bet that pressure is on to actually deliver bits at the PDC.)

Also at TechEd 2008, David Chappell gave a talk titled "Introducing Oslo". Interestingly, the talk was listed in the conference guide as "Road to Oslo" but by the time the conference the product team decided to unveil some of the key concepts to the developer community. That talk is on the TechEd 2008 DVDs, but I couldn't find it available online.

However, David also was interviewed by Ron Jacobs about Olso, and he hits the highlights. That interview and two related ones are available on the TechEd TechTalks site. The best method for locating these videos is to browse to the Microsoft TechEd Online Developers Library and enter "oslo" into the library search. (I wish there were better URLs for these individual TechTalks. Hint, hint.) From there you can choose from a number of video formats. Here are the three sessions you should get from the search.

• "The Road to Oslo: The Microsoft Services and Modeling Platform" with David Chappell and Ron Jacobs.
• "The Future of Modeling" with Steven Martin and Ron Bagby.
• "Framework and Microsoft BizTalk Best Practices with an Eye Toward Oslo" with Jon Flanders and Ron Jacobs.

Now there is news from my fellow MVP, Brian Loesgen, that he will be the second person (after David Chappell) speaking publicly about Oslo. He is presenting "A Preview of Oslo" at the First Annual International SOA Symposium in Amsterdam on October 7–8, 2008. It looks like a great conference, with keynote addresses from Thomas Erl and the other David Chappell (VP and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle). A perfect excuse to visit Holland this fall. But if Holland isn't on your dance card, Brian is looking forward to giving many other talks on Oslo.

And look for much more news at the PDC2008, October 27–30, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. To whet your appetite, the conference website recently doubled the number of published sessions.