Today seems a significant announcement from the WinFS team. See here. for details. Changing the delivery vehicle for a component that generated as much attention as WinFS can't have been an easy decision, but given the recent vision statement, I think in hindsight the writing was on the wall. The main thrust of the news is as follows: WinFS, as originally intended will be scaled back to meld into the afore mention Data Access vision. WinFS is relatively far along and its currents features that fit will be the first to be productized as a core part of ADO.NET vNext. Anything left out will probably be shelved for now... This is probably a good thing for the robustness of ADO.NET vNext vision, which I think broadly speaking stands to benefit from this, however I have two obvious concerns: what this will do the time lines we expect ADO.NET vNext and whether this will have any other impact beyond supporting the Entities feature. I think it is only natural that this at least imposes some pressure on the ADO.NET time lines, however more interesting is whether this will present issues at the fundamental ADO.NET API interfaces.