- Posted by reggie on May 1, 2007
Microsoft recently announced that they are removing the Entity Framework and tools from Visual Studio "Orcas" and will, instead, ship them as an update in the first half of 2008. It's pretty easy to see this as YAMM (Yet Another Microsoft Miss) but I instead look at this as a very positive sign of things changing.
Microsoft is accelerating many of the development timelines and embracing the "release early, release often" methodology. It seems that almost every Microsoft product these days comes out as a CTP about a million times even before it his beta stage. This just means greater awareness and better adoption. MS is even releasing alot more code as open source as they recently announced a Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that supports languages such as Python and Ruby. They are releasing it under a BSD style license.
It's clear that Orcas was going to be ready long before the Entity Framework and, rather than hold it up for another 6-9 months, they decided to ship Orcas and bolt on the EF later. This is a good move and indicates that MS is wanting to speed up release cycles all across their divisions. Let's hope this trend continues.