The Google Model Your Town Competition is running full-steam ahead with over 400 pins in the world map representing teams from six continents. From places like Cauquenes, Chile to Cape Town, South Africa to Suva City, Fiji to Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh, India to Aberdeen, Scotland to Tallin, Estonia and Burlington, Iowa people have taken on the challenge of representing their communities.

Folks in Iowa, Colorado, and British Columbia are motivating community members by building their own websites, garnering local press, tweeting, and soliciting help in online forums. Some are offering training on how to model to anyone interested. Iowa is asking middle and high school educators to form and advise teams of students.

There are still many people looking for team members. Visit the official group to meet folks in your area, or to post your own questions, ideas, or comments about the competition. The deadline for entering is March 1st of this year. Start the entry process by adding a pin to the map on our Get Started page and follow us on Twitter @modelyourtown.

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Model Your Town Competition Team

This is one the questions that I have had for awhile. Thanks the to Lynn Langit developer evangelist extraordinare. The Oslo model is starting to take shape.

”Oslo” is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. “Oslo” consists of:

• A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner
• A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models
• A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

“Oslo” was first announced by Robert Wahbe (Corporate Vice President of the Connected Systems Division) in October 2007.

And from Bill Gates at Tech Ed

“I think one of the biggest trends in application development that I talked about… is modeling, and we're making a big investment in that. We have what's been code named Oslo, and talked a little bit about it on our Web sites and our blogs, which is this model-driven development platform. It's actually taking the kind of models that you're seeing arising in specific domains, like software management in System Center, or your data design over in SQL, or your process activities over in BizTalk and saying, we need to take all these domains and be able to put them into one model space. In fact, we need to let people create their own domains that aren't just isolated, but that exist in this one modeling space. And that's what Oslo is about.”

Take a closer look at it from a website that Microsoft Has Set up for SOA and OSLO Here. I look forward to seeing what this is all about since I have been playing alot with the entity framework. Models make the code not only more readable there fore easier to understand. What will they announce on this at PDC bring us?