I have been talking to a big number of customers who were asking whether we can extend the SDM in VSTS Architect – e.g. the Distributed System Designers … well, until now I always said: „Hopefully some day, yes. But nothing for real currently”.

This is history. Microsoft released the portal site for the System Definition Model (SDM) SDK!

The System Definition Model (SDM) provides a critical technology component of the long-term Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) roadmap that will make IT systems dramatically easier—and orders of magnitude less costly—to develop, deploy, and operate. It will provide the unifying thread enabling integrated innovation from Microsoft and our partners across application development tools, operating systems, applications, hardware, and management tools. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects is a core deliverable of the DSI, which leverages the SDM to allow developers and architects to define service-oriented applications that will be configured into systems for deployment. Using the SDM SDK, you can extend the models included with the Distributed System Designers in Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects, which use SDM to model and validate distributed application systems for deployment into logical datacenter configurations. The System Definition Model SDK is part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK.