What's in Store : Author: Shishir Mehrotra

The killer app for getting users organized

WinFS Team — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:34:00 GMT

Hopefully by now, most of you have already seen some of the very cool WinFS demos (PDC 2005 Real Estate Demo, WinFS iWish Video) that we've built. Microsoft recently made a decision to productize some of these ideas into a new application - currently codenamed Project Orange. Unfortunately, I can't say much publicly about exactly what Project Orange is yet, but I can use this opportunity for a shameless recruiting plug. If you're excited about the opportunity to develop a new application for people to organize their information - entirely build on the new storage platform (WinFS) and new presentation platform (WPF, AKA Avalon) - check out job postings here: UI PM, Product Designer, Schema PM, SDET, Schema SDET, SDE, SDE, SDE Lead, Schema SDE Lead, or the many other jobs in WinFS-land!

Just to tease your curiosity, I've pasted in a couple of the descriptions here:

UI Program Manager

Do you want to help users finally get organized? Are you tired of working on standard usability challenges and excited by the chance to work on a whole new user paradigm for information management? Think that you have an eye for the “killer app” for a new platform? Did you ever want to work in a fast paced, start-up environment but still be involved with a project with huge impact? Do you want your work to ship to hundreds of millions of Windows users? Do you think Windows Presentation Foundation (AKA Avalon) and WinFS offer a truly new world for applications?

If so, Project Orange may be the right fit for you! Project Orange is a brand new team tasked with building a next-generation Information Explorer based on WinFS and WPF (AKA Avalon) to help users finally get organized. This is a soup-to-nuts project focused on defining a breakthrough user experience for users to unify, organize, and explore their data in meaningful new ways. WinFS and WPF offer dramatic new opportunities for information management by merging the traditional world of relational databases with end user data and offering new opportunities for interaction & visualization.

We are looking for a unique person that can blend skills from usability, design, and program management to spearhead definition of this new application. Successful candidates will be creative and be drawn to solving end-user interaction design problems in radical new ways.

Candidate should be experienced in the process and execution of user-centered interface design and presentation. Since this will be a small, fast-moving team, candidates should be strong multi-taskers who are able to balance work on multiple areas simultaneously. Experience working on UI design, data visualization, V1 projects / startups, and end-user desktop applications is a big plus. Candidate should either have a degree or significant work experience in Design (interaction design, industrial design, visual communications, or related field), HCI, Human Factors or something similar. Please be prepared to provide a portfolio for review. A BS/MS degree in Computer Science or related technical field would be bonus but is not required.

Software Development Engineer

Have you ever wanted to work in a start-up? Want to work on a fast-paced project with huge impact?

We're looking for talented and motivated developers who: have an eye for the "killer apps" for a new platform, want to help overcome the hurdle of information management for end-users, and are excited by the idea of finally delivering a relational filesystem in Windows. If so, we may be the team for you!

The WinFS team is starting up a new effort to build a killer application for WinFS. This is a soup-to-nuts project focused on defining a breakthrough user experience for users to unify, organize, and explore their data in meaningful new ways. Successful candidates will be creative and be drawn to solving end-user problems in radical new ways. Candidates should relish the opportunity to work on bleeding-edge technologies such as WinFX, Avalon and WinFS, and stay up to speed on a rapidly changing technology base. Since this will be a small, fast-moving team, candidates should have strong multitasking skills, be able to balance work on multiple projects simultaneously, and have the ability to take on planning and strategic tasks.

There will be ample opportunity for personal career development, with everyone on the team exposed to new challenges as part of the WinFS integrated storage project. A successful candidate will have excellent technical and communication skills, work well with other teams, will have successfully shipped product(s), and will have a strong customer focus.

Experience working on UI design, data visualization, Windows Shell extensions, V1 projects / startups, and end-user applications is a big plus. Two years of development experience; strong background in C#, C and C++; demonstrated experience shipping high quality products. Database and systems development experience is a plus, but not absolutely required. A BS/MS degree in Computer Science or related technical field preferred.

If you’re interested, you can use the career site or hit the email link on the right side of this page.

Author: Shishir Mehrotra

What a week

WinFS Team — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 01:15:00 GMT

Wow, what a week. I find it hard to describe the feeling that we've been having on the WinFS team this week. It's almost like we've all been keeping a great secret that we're just dying to share, and now we finally can.

For those of you that didn't get a chance to check out the channel 9 video yet, I'm Shishir Mehrotra and I run the product planning team for WinFS. My job basically splits into 3 parts: doing forward-looking research for where WinFS should be heading, working with partners to help them understand and build on WinFS, and managing the team that builds a lot of the cool WinFS demo apps. In terms of demo apps, we had a couple of them (LifeJournal and StoreSpy) featured in the Channel9 video, and I have some neat surprises up my sleeve for apps we're going to show at PDC. If you want to see the surprises, don't miss my PDC talk. :-)

Ok enough of the shameless plug, let's return to WinFS. So why are we psyched about WinFS? Is it the technical thrill? Sure that's some of it - there really is some incredible work going into creating WinFS. But for me personally, I get most excited by the potential for brand new applications enabled by this relational filesystem.

A couple weeks back, I was sitting down with one of the Microsoft recruiters (Mary) and she was showing me her computer. I was amazed. See, Mary's problem is that she can have days where she has 5 candidates on campus simultaneously in different interview loops that consist of 6+ interviewers each. She also has a long list of candidates that are coming for loops in the next week, all of which require immediate attention. So the net of it is: Mary's mailbox is a nightmare. Throughout the day, she’s getting bombarded by email. She'll get a mail that a candidate missed his interview shuttle and needs to be picked up. Or a candidate got lost and wandered into BillG's office accidentally. So all day long, she sits at her computer and adds followup flags to her mail, just trying to stay one step ahead of the onslaught.

Enter WinFS. Now she goes into her recruiting app and builds a query. She calls it "candidates that are interviewing today". She comes back to her email, and selects "mail related to <people>” and selects “candidates that are interviewing today" as <people>. She sets her mail app to color that set of messages bright red. And that's it. Each day, the list of "candidates that are interviewing today" gets automatically adjusted, and the right messages in her email are now marked red. And the best part is that the mail app and the recruiting app don’t need to know about each other – they just store items and queries in the filesystem and the other app picks them up and uses them.

So what's WinFS enabling here? Let's work backwards through the scenario. First, the ability to build that query - "mail related to candidates that are interviewing today" - is only enabled by the fact that WinFS has a real query processor. That's not a full-text, keyword search, but one that requires at least two joins between "tables", and requires knowing what “today” means. That's cool, but a query processor needs to know about relationships in order to be effective. So that's the second piece, WinFS has an information model that supports expressing relationships. In this case, there are two important relationships: one between a candidate and an interview loop, and one between a person and an email message. Great, but how does all this data get into my filesystem and get shared between these two apps? That's our third piece - WinFS allows applications to store data that is much richer than just files. I know, that's confusing - a file system that stores more than files? But yes, it's a relational filesystem, so in addition to storing files, WinFS allows you to define new "item types" that aren't files at all. So in this example, all four of the main item types - mail, contacts, interview loops, and queries - are non-file item types.

But the main point (saving the best for last) is the fourth piece: WinFS is a platform. At the heart, it’s a database engine providing a way to model relationships and store non-file data, making it a great data store for applications. That means that you can take your existing filesystem concepts and build them on a platform that offers you so much more.

Hopefully you're as excited about scenarios like that as I am. A big portion of my job is trying to predict the new applications that folks will build on WinFS. Thankfully, since Beta 1 is now released, I can start to hear your ideas directly! So don’t be shy… who’s got the best idea for an application using WinFS?

Author: Shishir Mehrotra