System.Runtime Usability Study Context

SQL Server Modeling Services (SSMoS) is a component of SQL Server Modeling (nee Oslo) technologies and was referred to as "Repository" in previous CTPs. It is a new role in Microsoft SQL Server vNext and provides a shared application lifecycle metadata platform over which people, tools and runtimes can rendezvous in an application lifecycle. It provides a foundation for customers (such as ISVs and Systems Integrators) to productively build metadata-driven application lifecycle solutions driven by metadata stored in a relational database. It has three major components: database, models + artifact loaders and core services.

 

Different types of artifacts are created and consumed in a typical application design, development, deployment and services lifecycle, such as requirements, design decisions, source code, assemblies, configuration files, application packages and deployment scripts. Currently the knowledge about an application and its relationship to the business and data center are spread out over several tools, databases and repositories in a typical IT environment. Same artifact in one database could be represented very differently in another. The difference in the format of the data and their data access mechanism leads to low degree of sharing and reuse of database schemas for these application lifecycle artifacts. With SQL Server Modeling Services, different application lifecycle tools can leverage the common data schema and access mechanisms for interacting with metadata about application lifecycle artifacts. Microsoft will ship with many application lifecycle model schemas (e.g. .NET assemblies, UML models, MSDeploy application packages, WCF Service Model, WF Workflow model, configuration files, etc.) and we expect our partners to create others.

In this study, we will focus on the relational model and loader for .NET Assemblies.