There has been a lot of talk about Microsoft whittling away at Oslo, its multi-year, multi-product initiative to help developers design, deploy and manage composite applications. But Burley Kawasaki, director of developer platform product management at Microsoft, disagrees with that assessment.

Kawasaki broke Oslo down into three components: its modeling platform (Quadrant tool), 'M' modeling language, and modeling language repository. The company shipped a CTP of those techonlogies, which are now known as "SQL Server Modeling," in early November. They will be rolled into the next edition of SQL Server, Kawasaki noted. "There was always a strong affinity of models to data. The scope [of Oslo] has not changed."

The Oslo vision originally encompassed BizTalk Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Kawasaki noted that .NET 4.0's ASP.NET MVC framework used M. "Developers define a shcema in M, and get automatic [ADO.NET] entity framework constructs," he added.

"People see branding as a sign of changed direction," Kawasaki said. "We have not. We are deeply integrating the core modeling technologies into the broad set of the Microsoft [development] stack."

What do you think? Has Microsoft dialed back its vision, or was Oslo too abstract a vision to be certain?