Microsoft Business Framework (MBF) is no more.

The new strategy is to make the various technologies that were to comprise MBS available as part of a variety of other currently shipping and soon-to-be-delivered Microsoft products.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced internally that it had reassigned the couple hundred MBF team members to other product teams, primarily the Visual Studio and Dynamics units, inside the company. Microsoft officials made the company's decision public on Wednesday.

MBF was to be a set of developer tools and software classes designed to ride atop the Microsoft .Net framework. MBF was developed primarily by Great Plains Software team, which Microsoft acquired in 2001. Microsoft was working to build a number of its products — including the Microsoft Business Portal, the next version of its Visual Studio .Net tool suite and its "Project Green" wave of ERP/CRM products — all on top of the MBF layer.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft Business Solutions corporate vice president, said that Microsoft is planning to deliver all of the same MBF features and functionality it originally envisioned, but just in a different way.

"MBF won't ship as a separate entity. It has gotten factored into parts of our other deliverables," Nadella explained.

MBF technologies can be found in the Windows Workflow Foundation engine, the forthcoming Language Integrated Query (LINQ) project extensions to Visual Basic and C#; and the Common Data Platform (CDP) application programming interfaces; Visual Studio 2005; and "Orcas," the version of Visual Studio slated to follow Visual Studio 2005, Nadella said.

Almost since the time Microsoft acquired Great Plains, MBF has been besieged by a number of delays for a variety of reasons.

In the spring of 2003, Microsoft moved the MBF team into the developer division. Then in early in the summer of 2004, Microsoft revealed that it had decided to delay the final release of MBF from 2005 to 2006 in order to synch it up with Vista/Longhorn.

When Microsoft decided in August, 2004 to remove the Windows File System (WinFS) functionality from Windows Longhorn/Vista and Longhorn Server, MBF was one of the casualties. At that point, Microsoft refused to pin a delivery-date target on either WinFS or MBF.

As of April of this year, however, Microsoft officials revealed that their plan was still to deliver MBF as a standalone set of classes and libraries. Microsoft had delivered one MBF test build to about 40 customers and software developers who were experimenting with the bits. Microsoft's goal was to deliver the final MBF framework toward the end of 2007, Darren Laybourn, general manager of MBF, told eWEEK.