Gary,

>Thank you David for this information. When I relayed your comments to a colleague of mine, he just "groaned" as he had been looking forward to the ObjectSpaces technology. Eitherway, we have downloaded the Versant demo stuff to get a feel for the product.

Rick Strahl and I went to Microsoft to meet with one of the ObjectSpaces team leaders after they announced its "delay". They truly seemed to understand the need for a good Object Relational Mapping solution but didn't want to release something that would have to be completely revised after its initial release. We talked about Paul Wilson's ORMapper engine (www.wilsondotnet.com) and they felt it most closely resembled what they were trying to accomplish with ObjectSpaces. They were interested in having their ORM solution work with both POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) objects--objects derived directly from System.Object--as well as providing additional enterprise-level services for objects derived from a specialized business object class.

Our goal with MM .NET is to create a generic wrapper for multiple ORM tools--this presents some challenges and will take some time, but it's still high on our list of "things to do".

Regards,