I got a few comments from people inside the team here about my last post – thanks to Colin and Omar, I now have to answer these questions:

It will be great if you can elaborate “but try to move it strategically where necessary and possible”.  This will be very helpful and critical for those who want to adopt scenario-driven development into their development process.

And

From a developer perspective this sounds very exciting. Especially the federated part, because I have yet to find an application that does this efficiently across multiple systems. When I read this, the first thing that pops in my mind is how is Microsoft planning to distribute it? Is the ‘big app’ shipped, shared? Can I get my hands on the source code? When can I get a sneak preview? I know that promising deliverables to the community when we are developing on top of shifting sands sounds a little scary, but as soon as we figure it out, a teaser might not be a bad idea to spark some interest. I think this would be would be worth posting on the next blog. 

Well indeed – how can I refuse to at least attempt to answer these? Taking the first one first, what I mean is that if we can find a customer scenario that we believe is important but is not currently addressed by the Oslo plan of record, or is not addressed satisfactorily, we should advocate a solution for that scenario to the rest of the Oslo team to get adequate support built into the product. It’s hard to be concrete here, but I’ll try, using an analogy.

Many people of a certain base geekiness or above build their own computer systems by buying motherboards, processors, memory and so forth and assembling them by hand. A subset of these people go a step further, and overclock these systems to get more out of them than mere specification would allow. However, until relatively recently, overclocking was frowned upon by processor and memory, etc. manufacturers as they couldn’t guarantee that things would keep on working – if you’re operating something beyond its specification, all warranty bets are off, basically. People still wanted to do it, though, and there was a fairly substantial demand to be able to access more of the basic properties of each component directly to allow fine-tuned overclocking.  Some component manufacturers saw a chance for some differentiation here, and began to offer fine tuning parameter access and official overclocking support (e.g. the advent of EPP in DRAM specifications). So what do the others do? Do they cede the overclocking market to those players, or do they also jump in?

You only need to look at the PC components market now to know the answer – it’s almost impossible to buy a motherboard whose BIOS doesn’t allow for some flavor of overclocking settings, it’s easy (and cheap!) to buy memory designed to be run above specification (or did they just lower the specification? Hmmm) and even the processor manufacturers sell varieties specifically targeted at the overclocking/enthusiast market.

OK, I suspect this sucks as an analogy (nice story, though, eh?), but if you put us in the shoes of the overclocking community and the Oslo product teams in the place of the component manufacturers, then it sort of hangs together. Just.

Question 2 is easier to explain but again hard to be absolutely 100% definitive. We intend to ship the app as binaries, as source code, on MSDN, on any distribution DVDs Oslo technologies might find themselves on, with guidance, as samples, as reference material, etc. In short, we have the desire to make the thing broadly available in as large a number of forms as makes sense, as soon as we can.

It’s the weekend now, so bye.

Adam (adamde@microsoft.com)