He has been active in the field of object-orientation since the early nineties. His research interests include programming languages and their evaluators, aspect-oriented programming, meta-programming and more recently also programming languages for ambient systems.

Wolfgang and his students have developed the AmbientTalk language which has recently been open sourced. The language targets ambient-oriented environments where failure is the rule rather than the exception. It supports new service discovery techniques, techniques to deal with knowledge that is distributed over volatile connections, and advanced remote object referencing techniques, as well as replication and reversible computations.

In 2008 he was awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Prize for his contribution to object-oriented programming of ambient systems.