In 2007, Microsoft first discussed publicly its plans for “Oslo” — an amorphous multi-product effort that encompased future releases of .Net, Visual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server. By the fall of 2008, Microsoft had decoupled .Net, VIsual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server from Oslo. When officials said Oslo, they meant Microsoft’s evolving modeling strategy and technologies, specifically the M language, the Quadrant tool and the associated metadata repository.
In the summer of 2009, as part of one of Microsoft’s countless reorgs, the Oslo team was combined with Microsoft’s Data Programability team (which manages Astoria, Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity Framework (EF), XML, ADO.Net and tools/designers).
She explains:
Multiple contacts of mine are telling me that Microsoft has decided to shelve Quadrant and “refocus” M.
A Microsoft's spokesperson was quoted:
“We are still working on SQL Server Modeling and it remains an important part of our Data Platform strategy. Our current plans are to ship our modeling platform in a future release of SQL Server/Azure. Customers can download the latest CTP which we have updated to use the VS 2010 and .NET 4 to give us feedback.”
Ever since it's inception, the project endured major rescoping without ever emerging from a CTP status. With Microsoft presiding at the future of UML, the moderate success of the Software Factories, and the rapid growth of Eclipse as a strong Modeling platform, one can only wonder what strategy will Microsoft adopt in the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) space. What's your take on it? Where is the future of MDE? How can Microsoft participate in that future?
