O/R mapping BOF

In the PDC I was not able to get into the O/R mapping BOF because of my 'Exhibitor' badge. This time it seems 'all badges' are allowed in the BOFs so I made it.

Scott Bellware hosted it and asked if someone from the ObjectSpaces team would like to talk about the reasons why it's not going to ship in Whidbey, Luca Bolognese was there and explained it. He said that they currently have 3 O/R mapping technologies in development (MBF / WinFS/ ObjectSpaces) and doing long-term thinking it made sense to have only one API instead of shipping one now and deprecate it later.

Most of the heads of the ObjectSpaces team were there, and Andrew was writing something that looked as a blog post during the BOF (he was sitting next to me so I spied him ;), so you can probably read more in his weblog.

The people from the ObjectSpaces team also said that the API will probably change a lot.

Most of the people was curious about what O/R mapping really is and some people were really using it. The discussion was about how difficult was to map the db to an object model, how 'transparent' can persistence be, and the fact that noone wants to write ADO.NET code manually anymore.

Scott asked if there were any O/R mapping ore data persistence vendors in the audience, I raised my hand and explained that DeKlarit was not an O/R mapping tool, but it solved similar problems in a different (of course, better ;) way.