What is the Future of Domain/Entity programming at Microsoft?

Question

I have currently been looking into Domain programming solutions and trying to predicate the future of the technology for my current customer.

Where is Microsoft going with this considering that there seems to be many different solutions depending on which technology your looking at. For example there is Entity Framework in .net and also there is the whole SQL Server Modelling solution that will be making its appearance in SQL Server. Part of the latter contains a language called M that seems to do the modelling and describing of entities in a decoupled way.

Where are they going with Visio?

Is there a reason that Microsoft seems to be avoiding the whole UML thing and reinventing the wheel, after looking at UML for a while now it seems to be turin complete and does the whole shooting match that could be decoupled from code and storage.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I get the feeling Microsoft is betting on many horses in this race.

The support for POCOs in the latest Entity Framework release, to me, is a (good) sign that DDD is one of them.

With regards to UML. I actually downloaded Visio 2010 recently, and nothing has changed UML-wise the last ten years or so.

Visual Studio 2010, however, has gotten increased UML support (five diagram types supported).

Answer 2

After some reading around, Microsoft are tying things together in the future M and Entity Framework are linked in some mysterious way. From what I gather the idea is that M will create the SQL Server Model (other databases are also valid) and feed into the Entity Framework. To take this even further it looks like you can use your favourite XSI UML tool and feed it into SQL Server Model.

So the disjointed stuff at present will come together.