First of all I just wanted to express my sympathy to all the victims of the appalling bombings in Madrid, there is no excuse whatever your political, religious or other beliefs for wantom murder of innocent people whose only crime was to be travelling to work. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Secondly, I posted a comment to Frans Bourma's excellent piece(http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2004/03/11/87836.aspx) on why the delays to Yukon should not delay the delivery of Whidbey. I would much rather that Microsoft released Whidbey this year. I thought the only technical connection between Yukon and Whidbey was the new System.Data.sqlServer namespace. I would suggest they leave this out until Yukon is ready and ship the rest. There are a number of ASP.NET 2 features that are really useful and there is no point in developing them yourselves if Whidbey is just round the corner. As the date keep slipping it is making it harder to sell .Net to customers. Telling them I need to write all this code now but I know MS will make it obsolete with Whidbey is not an easy sell. Also is WinFS based on the Yukon code ? If so at this rate we will not see Longhorn until the next decade. I thought the original idea behind the larger .Net vision was that instead of shrink wrapped software we would move towards a subscription model. For me that means continuous improvement rather a big bang approach. I would rather have a reduced version of a system ship early than all the interdepencies meaning I have to wait years for something to ship. I thought the idea behind a Service Orientated Architecture was to move towards a loosely coupled architecture. Now tight coupling of applications is slowing the whole process down. A question to the Microsoft Development teams: why not prioritize features and the amount of effort required to get the to work and then ask the development community how many of the features really have to be there for an initial shipping version? Otherwise, people will look increasingly towards alternatives.