Mike Guttman, director of the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) FastStart Program, talks to Software Development Magazine about MDA and mentions Microsoft's efforts. First, SD Magazine asks how Microsoft fits into MDA - making notice to the fact that it hasn't “embraced modeling.” Then, SD Magazine asks, “But if you don't have buy-in from Redmond...” This is where my interest peaked. Mike says...
I don't believe theirs is a viable strategy; they don't even dominate the modeling market. I think they have an uphill battle, and third parties will start writing translation tools - and that's a nuisance.
First off, I don't necessarily agree with Microsoft's approach to modeling, but I think Team System is a big step forward. I wish it would've been more complete of a system, but this is usually what you get from Microsoft on initial product releases.
Second, Microsoft will by no means dominate the modeling market - I agree - but if you think that this is Microsoft's intentions, you're horribly mistaken. Microsoft is actually doing MDA a huge favor - it's bringing developers who would normally not do any modeling to the modeling table. Granted, I'm sure that most .NET developers still won't use the modeling tools in Team System, but I believe that a number of people will use them since they're built-in. Microsoft is not looking to take over for non-.NET modeling, which is why they came up with a proprietary modeling language. They want to dig into some of that Borland, IBM Rational, Smart Draw, and even Visio market-share.
Uphill battle? What? Do you know what you're talking about? I don't think so. Microsoft has the undisputed best IDE. What does this mean? It means that more users use - and love - Visual Studio than any other product. So, by giving people another tool for free, I don't see people arguing. I highly doubt anyone will say, “I don't think I'm going to upgrade to VS05 because of the new modeling features.” Come on. Seriously.
Now, the one point that I will agree with Mike on is that I don't like the position Microsoft has taken with leaving Team System to UML (and vice-versa) translations to the community and third party vendors. Obviously, tool integrations should be left up to vendors, but something as simple as XMI exports of Team System models. That's something that could be done by a lot of people - especially considering Microsoft's less than ideal implementation of their modeling environment. I, for one, will need to create some sort of XMI export so I don't have to recreate classes in another tool simply to do interaction diagrams. Hopefully, Microsoft will change their mind on this.