I’m not surprised at all about this announcement from Doug Purdy about the changes coming to the “Oslo” tools.  Ever since the Connected Systems group was “merged” with the data group, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the modeling work would begin to heavily focus on the Microsoft data stack. I’ll wait to see how the tools evolve before making an opinion about their usefulness.  I’m actually optimistic that in the end, more Microsoft developers will be better off as the tools will be more likely to help them in their everyday development.  As it was, the M language and associated tools seemed to be targeting a niche market of language developers.  Looking forward to PDC and hearing all about how these new tools are going to help me model my application data and hopefully help build up a good deal of the infrastructure for my data access layer.