One of the most prominent of these technologies is the Microsoft Business Framework (MBF).

The Microsoft Business Framework is a set of developer tools and software classes designed to build atop Microsoft's .Net Framework. Various Microsoft product groups, as well as some of its third-party software partners, are working to build a number of its products—including the Microsoft Business Portal, future releases of its Visual Studio .Net tool suite and its "Code Green" suite of business applications built on top of a single code base—all on top of the MBF layer.

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Last week, Microsoft officials announced they had decided to cut WinFS from Longhorn client and server in order to ship the releases in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Currently, Microsoft is not stating when it hopes to ship WinFS, other than to say that a first beta version of the technology will be available to testers in 2006.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft revealed that it had decided to delay the final release of MBF from 2005 to 2006 in order to sync it up with Longhorn. But as MBF has WinFS dependencies, all bets are off, as to when MBF will see the light of day.

"We've aligned [the] WinFS and MBF technologies to make sure that the APIs and features are consistent, so we're targeting to ship MBF when we ship WinFS," acknowledged John Montgomery, director of marketing for Microsoft's developer division. "There's still some technology rationalization going on, so dates and features may change—standard caveat this early in the process—but that's plan of record."

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