Got an email today in my box from Visual Studio Magazine talking about the next generation of ADO which will feature a reincarnation of ObjectSpaces object/relational mapping technology.  I don't feel like registering on their site to read page two (even though it's free :p ), but I'm sure Scott Guthrie will blog about it at some point.   I must admit that I'm skeptical.  I tried to persist objects to my DB once by mapping the object properties and fields to XML, and it was cumbersome and slow, not to mention nightmarish versioning problems - adding fields or properties is not as bad as changing or removing since you can always set defaults on those new fields and remap the objects in the old version onto the new version.  But then I had a lot of issues with Xpath trying to query the DB.  It would seem that there is a new query language called OPath, but my concerns are still the same.  Of course I'll get it when it comes out and play around with it, but I'd wager it will be quite some time before I rely on it for business critical needs that demand high performance.