When Microsoft started Oslo (in short, Microsoft strategy for model-driven development consisting in the M modeling language + the Quadrant modeling environment + a model repository), we all became very excited. If Microsoft was keen on investing in MDD it was a good indication that they were convinced that they could make some money out of it.

However, it was never crystal clear Microsoft's strategy behind Oslo. A first warning came a few months ago when rumors about the real roadmap for Oslo started to surface.

Last week, Douglas Purdy announced the big news: Oslo was now SQL Server Modeling (more info ). With this change of direction, Oslo was demoted to become an environment for designing and managing SQL Server databases. At least this is what the whole community understood (see some complaints )

Since then, though, Microsoft has defended the move (see here , here and the Q&A page here ) claiming that the move does not affect Oslo's original goals and that "We remain committed to the core DSL capabilities of the "M" language".

Only time will tell if this is true. Meanwhile, let me just quote Markus Voelter post on this topic : So yes, I am somewhat disappointed. Oslo will probably still be a cool and useful tool for data modeling and programming on the SQL server. But it has lost its appeal to me as a general purpuse DSL tooling (at least until I get convinced otherwise :-))

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