Oslo (Microsoft) - Model-driven Development

Model-driven Development

The SQL Server Modeling CTP, then, is that set of tools that make it easier to build more and more of any application purely out of data. The SQL Server Modeling technologies aim to have the entire application throughout its entire lifecycle completely described in data/metadata that it contained within a database. As described on the Data Developer Center:

Model-driven development in the context of the SQL Server Modeling CTP indicates a development process that revolves around building applications primarily through metadata. This means moving more of the definition of an application out of the world of code and into the world of data, where the developer’s original intent is increasingly transparent to both the platform and other developers. As data, the application definition can be easily viewed and quickly edited in a variety of forms, and even queried, making all the design and implementation details that much more accessible. As previously discussed, Microsoft technologies have been moving in this direction for many years; things like COM type libraries, .NET Framework metadata attributes, and XAML have all moved increasingly toward declaring one’s intentions directly as data—in ways that make sense for your problem domain—and away from encoding them into a lower-level form, such as x86 or .NET Framework intermediate language (IL) instructions. This is what the SQL Server Modeling CTP is all about.

The "models" in question aren't anything new: they simply define the structure of the data in a SQL server database. These are the structures with which the SQL Server Modeling tools interact.