What happened to WinFS?

Longhorn updates

Girish Bharadwaj — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 13:21:00 GMT

re: What happened to WinFS?

John Cavnar-Johnson — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 14:11:00 GMT

I think it's appropriate to ask the question: Will WinFS ever ship? The object-oriented filesystem is starting to look like Moby Dick to Bill Gates's Ahab. From the very first discussions about replacing FAT with HPFS/NTFS on through Cairo, Exchange, the Web Storage System, SPS, and now, WinFS, the OO filesystem has always been 3 or 4 years away. I wish Microsoft all possible success in building WinFS, but, call me Ishmael if you must, I ain't holding my breath for a 2007 release of anything that looks remotely like what I saw at the PDC.

re: What happened to WinFS?

Randy Charles Morin — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 14:37:00 GMT

Jeremy, the following line caught my attention. "Built-in schemas for calendar, contacts, documents, media, etc." What type of schemas are these? Are they similar to the Office schemas, that is, XML Schemas?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FE118952-3547-420A-A412-00A2662442D9&displaylang=en

Please forward response via email to randy@kbcafe.com, just in case I don't remember to get back here.

Chris Sells

TrackBack — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:30:00 GMT

Chris Sells

re: What happened to WinFS?

lynn eriksen — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:46:00 GMT

I remember raeding on Friday about the possibity for WinFS to be released 'Out-of-band' so to speak. That would be okay on a server platform, but at some point wel'll need it default on the client. 2008?

re: What happened to WinFS?

Stéphane Lajoie — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 17:29:00 GMT

That line about schemas for calendar and contacts also caught my attention. Are you guys re-writing Outlook by any chance? Is MAPI dying?

re: What happened to WinFS?

Jeremy — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 03:00:00 GMT

John, your skepticism is well grounded. I think the recent WinHEC update of WinFS (available to MSDN subscribers) showed some real forward progress, but the burden is rightly on the WinFS team to come out with another community release to show their continued progress, and to meet Jim's stated goal of a WinFS beta at Longhorn RTM. There aren't any release plans to announce, so until there are, you are right to be skeptical.

To be fair, the Exchange web storage system did actually ship...but it certainly wasn't the long-lived integrated storage platform we had hoped it might be. And SPS was never about being the replacement for the file system -- arguably the indexing features and the portal UI were more exciting than the doc management store (and that's coming from a guy who spent 3.5 years building the doc management UI ;)

re: What happened to WinFS?

Jeremy — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 03:08:00 GMT

Randy, Stéphane,

The WinFS plan announced at PDC always anticipated a set of built-in schemas. There's a good overview of WinFS at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/winfs/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwinfs/html/winfs03112004.asp

There was also a big visio diagram of the scheams as they existed at the time. It's out of date now, but gives at least a flavor of the plans,
download.microsoft.com/download/2/7/a/27ab8218-e3d8-4261-b8e4-6ffc7bd8f199/winfsschemadiagram.vsd

The Office team gets upset if I pretend to know anything about their plans for Outlook and MAPI, so no comment on that one :)

re: What happened to WinFS?

Samuel Druker — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:00:00 GMT

One big difference is that the WinFS schemas describe how to store those Item types in a WinFS store. XML schemas generally aren't tied to a specific store, but in fact are as store-independent as possible.

Incarnating the various Item types in a WinFS Schema Definition lets the store know how to apply WinFS services to it like sync, rules, transactions, full-text search, relationships and so on.

re: What happened to WinFS?

Ian Ringrose — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 09:46:00 GMT

I work for an ISV (independent software vendor), we have to write software that works on the computers our customers have. Even if only 1% of the users at out customer’s site cannot run our software that is enough to loose an order! Therefore we will not be able to make use of WinFS, until it is on at least 95% of the computers within our target market.

This will not happy for LH until something like 5 years after LH has shipped!

What we need is a set of API that will work with WinFS if the customer has it, otherwise will just provide a FileSave/FileOpen replacement that lets the user see/manage their metedata. A plug in for explore that can also show the metadata would be good.

Having the metadata indexed with rich search support can wait until LH.

Thinking back a long time, what made Windows 95 catch on so fast was Win32s, vendors could write 32 bit software that would work (just about) on Windows 3.1. As soon as a customer upgraded to Windows 95, all these Win32s packages worked a lot better. LH needs the same, software that will take advantage of it from day one.

ringi at bigfoot dot com

re: What happened to WinFS?

John Cavnar-Johnson — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 15:16:00 GMT

Just to be clear, lots of interesting and useful things have come out of this seemingly neverending quest for an better filesystem (OO is probably the wrong term). Just not what was promised. It reminds me a lot of AI. Lots of cool stuff, but not what we aimed at. In the case of AI, I think the underlying conceptual basis was fundamentally wrong (just my opinion used for an analogy, let's not start that argument here) and I wonder whether or not that is the case here. Is WinFS a workable system that just needs some extra time for the technology to catch up? Or is it a flawed concept that will never work? I don't know, but I suspect Microsoft is in as good a position as anybody to figure that out.

re: What happened to WinFS?

AdventuresInHomeNetworking — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 23:44:00 GMT

http://steves.businessblog.com/blog/_archives/2004/8/30/132824.html

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