An article over on techworld.com reports that Microsoft will offer data modeling support in Visual Studio called Microsoft Entities :
The ADO team's ADO.Net Entities moves the data model up from the physical structure of relational tables to a "data model that more accurately represents business entities such as 'Customer' or 'Order' that could map to multiple relational tables and views," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft. His blog is frequently a source of insight into what is going on at Microsoft.
A preview of Entities is due before the end of this year, and it will be in the Orcas version of Visual Studio.
Entities will allow developers to define complex mapping to relational data, enabling development of new business structures when the data schema cannot be changed, Somasegar said.
To me, though, this sounds more like functionality that DBMS vendors put on top of their engines in the mid-Eighties to make them look and feel more relational.
What's really going to frustrate me when this comes out is all the conversations that go like this:
Me: So if you look at the CUSTOMER entity, you c.....
Bob: Uh, that's not an entity.
Me: Are you saying that you believe it should be split? Or combined with another entity?
Bob: I'm saying that you don't know what you are talking about, that's not an ADO .Net Entity..
Me: Yes, this is a data model, not a ....
Bob: Nope, that's not what a data model is.
Me: Uh...not again.
I guess though, that since they chose not to call it ADO .Net Classes, at least they are admitting that classes and entities are not the same thing. And perhaps that by wanting to appear to be more business-oriented, they believe that there is some value in business modeling and understanding business rules. Maybe.