Douglas Purdy

This morning we announced the formation of the “M” Specification Community (MSC) at MIX09.

The MSC is a group of individuals and organizations throughout the software industry working together to develop the “M” language specification.

Our goals with the MSC are two-fold: 

1. Ensure the broadest possible support for “M” with a number of “M” implementations across multiple platforms and excellent interoperability with existing standards/approaches.
2. Ensure that we have the best possible language that can span the presentation, services and data domains and is well informed by the XML, modeling, and Web communities.

The MSC is a key part of our broader strategy to move the industry toward model-driven development and unlocking the value that this approach provides to our customers and partners.

This community will function primarily through a public discussion list, just like other public specification efforts, with the goal of a good interchange of ideas that will lead us to the best possible language with the broadest industry support.

The MSC has already shown a great deal of promise toward our goals as two key open-source technical leaders will serve as “charter members” of the community:  James Clark (Technical Lead of the XML WG and Editor of the XSLT 1.0 Specification) and Ed Merks (Technical Lead of the Eclipse Modeling Framework and PMC (Project Management Committee) Lead for the top level Eclipse Modeling Project).

You can find more details about MSC on the “Oslo” Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/oslo/msc).

We made an explicit decision to be “low-key” about the formation of this community.

We want it to be about getting the best technical solution and the benefits that comes with that focus.

If you are interested in helping out, please join us.