I'll be speaking at the 2010 DogFood Conference that Microsoft puts on here in Columbus.  Danilo Castilo runs it (largely) and it is pretty cool - a neat community event on a budget.

It's a cool collection of talks about the newest Microsoft products and how people are using them.  Thus the name: 'DogFood' from the phrase 'eating your own dog food.'

I'll be speaking with Mario Fulan about using AFDS 2.0 to cross domain borders.  If you don't already know Mario, he is a beast - one of like ten Certified Sharepoint Masters in the whole freakin universe or something.  He has forgotten more about SharePoint than I will ever learn.  I do know Windows Identity Foundation a little bit though, so that's what I'll be covering.

The conference is at www.dogfoodcon.com and is selling out really fast.  If you are interested in the hot new stuff, check it out and get registered while you can.  It's next month - November 4 and 5.

It's common knowledge that I have been following Oslo / SQL Server Modeling Services very closely.  I am working on a book on the topic, and have posted a number of blog entries.  The speaking circuit has been good to me too, and I have given my Software Modeling With ASCII talk five or six times already this year.

My focus has been on M, but today we are talking about Quadrant.  Quadrant is part of a trio of tools that includes M (a language to build data and domain models) and Modeling Services (a set of common models and repository).  Quadrant itself is tool to interact visually with SQL Server databases.

I've been watching Quadrant for over a year now, and I had a lot of questions about its viability in the marketplace.  As a data management tool, it was underpowered, but as a data browsing tool, it was overpowered.  When I eventually came to realize that it could be a domain model browser, my interest was piqued.  Since you could define the quadrants using M, it would be effectively possible to build comprehensive data management 'dashboards' in Quadrant, and use them in a power user role.

Over time, however, I began to realize that this was an edge case.  The business users and data managers that need these solutions will still find development in M too time-consuming, and the professional developers who would be asked to help them would just rather work in C#.  It will end up that the business users will go back to Access and Excel, data managers will just use SQL Management Studio, and professional developers will use Windows Forms or XAML in C#.

Apparently, Microsoft saw this too.

I am sad to see Quadrant go.  It was a beautiful application, and could have been a foundation to a number of very, very cool tools.  Hopefully the Data team wil find another use for the technology.

It should be noted that SQL Server Modeling is not necessarily dead at all.  Models can still be built with M, and exposed to the world in OData.  Applications can still be built against this model using Visual Studio, and the data can still be managed using SQL Management Studio.  

The loss of Quadrant doesn't impact this vision, and I hope that Microsoft realizes this and continues down the path toward an enterprise-class repository.  It's the last piece of the puzzle that keeps large enterprises from deploying SQL Server in application-centric environments.