The most recent edition of the .NET Rocks podcast interviewed Jeremy Miller and David Laribee. They made the observation that Microsoft’s development tools are implicitly designed to support database-first development rather than object model-first development. Because they are committed to agile and object model-first development, they’re feeling resistance from some of Microsoft’s products.
Miller and Laribee are part of an interesting group of developers who call themselves “ALT.NET” because they’re developing on Microsoft’s .NET framework but are looking for alternative tools. They embrace the bottom of the Microsoft technology stack — operating systems, languages, compilers — but not the top — tools for modeling, code generation, testing, etc.