I'm currently in Bellevue, WA, attending a Microsoft event for us developer evangelists, and I'm just back into my hotel room from a meeting with Jim Allchin who gave us an update on the Longhorn roadmap - you can read the official press release here. (You can, as expected, find the first derisive comments already, for example here. :-)

What does it mean? The bad news is that the great Longhorn vision which was presented at the PDC in 2003 has to wait a little longer to become reality in its entirety. The Longhorn shell will probably still be pixel-based, and we will still organize our information in hierarchical folders. Also, it remains to be seen what happens to the plans to merge the recently canceled ObjectSpaces into WinFS.

The good news is that

• Longhorn will ship in 2006,
• WinFS will probably be quite complete (span the network, e.g., not being restricted to the local machine, as was recently speculated) when it ships, hopefully with Longhorn Server in 2007,
• Avalon + Indigo will be available on XP and Server 2003 - isn't that what almost everyone has been asking for??
• the wishes and demands of lots of customers have been taken into account when making these decisions.

So, I personally think that the good aspects outweigh the bad ones.

Now I'll go and update my Longhorn slide decks... :-)