Microsoft ponders Emacs effort

Microsoft is looking at Emacs text editor technology to help enable model-driven development as part of its Oslo project.

Acknowleding recent references to an Emacs.net-like environment, Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, said in a statement released by the company that this referred to research and development on model-driven development.

"While it's too soon to announce any specifics in terms of product offerings, this generally referred to some of the early thinking we're doing around Oslo's modeling platform currently in development at Microsoft, specifically focused on how developers will want to edit and create declarative models," Kawaski said. "We'll share additional updates as we have them."

In a recent blog entry, Douglas Purdy, a product unit manager on Microsoft's Connected Systems Architecture team, said the company was looking for developers and testers to build a tool described as "Emacs.net."

Unveiled in October, Oslo involves model-driven design and features a set of technical investments to be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft platform products such as Visual Studio and BizTalk Server. Beta releases of Oslo technology are planned for release this year.

With Oslo, models become the applications, rather than just describing applications.