Alex points out that ObjectSpaces, a technology for object-relational mappings, will be released when Longhorn comes out. Initially, it was supposed to be released together with Visual Studio 2005.
The delay of ObjectSpaces itself is not something that touches me personally, although I am gaining interest in O/R mappers since most of my development projects involve moving around data in databases. And I would have preferred a technoloy that is being backed up by a company that can support it for more than one or two years. Also keeping in mind that you would imagine that a team of clever architects and developers are behind the product.
What bothers me, is that ObjectSpaces, together with Yukon, Whidbey, and all 'good stuff to come' will not be available within the planning scope of any of the projects that I am working on or will be working on in the near future. Even though there is so much information flowing out of Microsoft on these products. As Dino Esposito puts it “ObjectSpaces is one of the most interesting new features in Microsoft Visual Studio code-named "Whidbey". ” And this was three months ago. I very much wonder about the planning process at Microsoft...
So on the one hand you've got Microsoft and affiliated authors promoting the newest of technologies with daily changes to the release schedule. On the other hand there seems to be a growing number of developers crying out to focus on todays issues. Let's not mention the May 2004 issue of MSDN Magazine shall we?
This is an old debate I'm sure. Even though I'm a developer right now, I have a degree in international marketing (and public administration, but that's another story) and one of the first principles you learn as a marketeer is that quality is very much dependent on how you manage expectations. If you hype your product too much, you're likely to get a negative response when you finally deliver (if at all). So you're bound to get negative feedback when you fail to manage these expectations properly. Microsoft has, however, always had a clever technique where they would introduce something new and deliver it within a timeframe that was only just within reasonable expectations, although always delayed from its initial schedule. I fear that this time, they're threading a very thin line.