In case you haven't been keeping up, Microsoft have announced that Longhorn will come out in 2006, but some of the promised features will need to be cut back to make that release date.

One of the big promised features that is going to be at least reduced in scope is WinFS:

“Basically it looks like most of Avalon is going to get the ax. And most of WinFS is going to get axed,” said a developer who asked not to be named.

(from Microsoft Watch)

One thing that I haven't discussed once is what will happen to ObjectSpaces – Microsoft upcoming Object/Relational Mapping technology. In Microsoft's words:

Developers who have been following the evolution of ObjectSpaces (a technology effort building services supporting object representations of data in relational databases) will be interested to know that these efforts are being merged with the object/data technology WinFS. This decision was made after evaluating the overlapping scenarios that each of these technologies delivered and firm feedback that developers and architects need a consistent, long-lived API delivering this functionality.

Will the delay in the full release of WinFS further delay the release of ObjectSpaces? Should .NET developers begin to look at non-Microsoft ORM APIs? And what motivation is there for third party vendors to fill that gap knowing that at some undisclosed future time Microsoft will release its own API?

Personally, I'm a bit disappointed that WinFS is being left out. I seem to be one of the few people around that believes it would be useful.