What's in Store : Author: Vijay Bangaru

WinFS Mailbox II

WinFS Team — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:59:00 GMT

Hi Everyone! Before I disappear for the holidays, I thought I’d dig through our inbox, the blog, and newsgroup, and answer a few more questions.

Q: Chris asks, “While it's good to have a common silo that all apps can easily use, it's seems a bit risky. Wouldn't some rogue app/spyware have an easier time getting to financial Quicken/Money data?”
A: Even though all your data is in a single silo, all the data isn’t equally accessible. WinFS provides two data protection mechanisms. First, there is share-level security that controls access to your WinFS share. Second, there is item level security that supports NT compatible security descriptors. In order to access an item, the caller must be provisioned at the both share and the item. To manage this, WinFS will provide a rich API for security administration. Also in Vista there is the concept of “integrity level” for an application (Mandatory Integrity Control). Data can be configured to prevent lower integrity apps from accessing it. Simon (our security PM) will post more detailed description about this soon.

It’s important to note that an application shouldn’t be using file format complexity as a primary security measure. For important information like bank account and credit card numbers, you could continue to store them in an encrypted and password-protected file. But, there’s no reason that this file couldn’t live in WinFS.

Applications may have some data they definitely want to lock away. WinFS, however, gives the application developer the opportunity to share the data he chooses to share. Today there is a good amount of information in a money file and not all of it necessarily needs to be private. For example, Money could have “payees” (i.e. someone you get a check from or write a check to) represented as WinFS contacts.

Q: Retla1 asks, “What’s the best way to get some data into WinFS?”
A: This is a great question. After all, once you install WinFS, there isn’t that much to look at except an empty relational filesystem. :-) Thankfully, there are number of good ways to get data into your store. The first set of ways is to copy it in. Open up our awesome WinFS Shell Namespace Extension (in the Windows Explorer, click through My Computer->WinFS Stores->DefaultStore). Now just drag and drop some files in.

Or, if you prefer, use copy or xcopy. Our Win32 support is robust, so please try it out (note the Win32 path is a UNC path: “\\<machinename>\defaultstore\foo.doc”). You can also redirect your “My Documents” folder to your WinFS store. This would move that data into WinFS. Any application that respects Shell APIs will work fine. (If it doesn’t work, let us know.)

If you prefer, you can sync data into your store. Beta 1 came with some sample sync adapters. Open up StoreSpy (one of our unsupported tools) and import some stuff from Outlook. If you install WinFS on two computers, be sure to use Rave to share that data.

Q: Lars asks, “Does WinFS look inside files (word, excel, pdf, etc.) like desktop search engines do?”
A: Yes. When a file is stored in WinFS, its metadata will be extracted by type specific property handlers. Part of our Beta 2 work is to integrate this with the Windows Desktop Search handlers. The end result is that a Windows Desktop Search query will return WinFS and non-WinFS files.

Q: Qearsa asked, “What about all the Shell improvements in Vista? How does WinFS fit into that?”
A: Vista provides a rich user experience using indexing technology. By integrating into that technology and providing a Shell Namespace Extension, WinFS will provide this same experience to users. This means your Vista searches will have results from many stores including WinFS, NTFS and Outlook. In addition, WinFS will provide the opportunity for the new and compelling user experiences we discussed in earlier posts.

Q: A few people asked, “Will Beta 1 run on 2003 or x64?”
A: Nope, we’re not planning to re-release the Beta 1 to support any other platform. We’re currently evaluating what platforms our Beta 2 will support.

Q: A few people also asked, “Are there any new features in the Beta 1 refresh?”
A: The re-release has the same functionality of the original, but runs on the RTM version of the .NET Framework 2.0.

Q: Timbu asks, “Desktop search applications already aggregate my data from different apps (like Outlook and Sharelook). Isn’t this ‘Unify’?”
A: Desktop Search represents the first step in a truly unified store. While you can use desktop search to see different types of data from different silos in a result view, the data itself still resides in separate silos. This means it is hard to operate across all that data. For example, I can search for all my files that have “Shell Namespace Extension” and get a huge list of emails, docs, and other files. At this point, there are some operational limitations. For example, I can’t copy all that data and put it in a single folder or USB drive, burn it to CD, or even share it out. Desktop search is a great end user application, but it’s not a platform. WinFS is a platform with great programmer access through managed APIs targeting the unified and extensible data types.

One last question, but I need the answer from you: “What should I write about next?” I’ll like to start getting into more details and away from the high level stuff. :-) Please post some comments with suggestions and ideas.

Happy Holidays!

Author: Vijay Bangaru

WinFS Beta 1 Refresh now available

WinFS Team — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 21:51:00 GMT

MSDN subscribers can now download our Beta 1 Refresh release. This release contains the same functionality of our original Beta 1 release and runs on the final release of the .NET Framework 2.0 . Before installing the refresh, make sure you uninstall your previous WinFS install along with any Beta releases of Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 2.0.

There’s also a handy tool that uninstalls all the VS products for you.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

Unify, Organize, Explore, and Innovate. Oh my! (Part 4)

WinFS Team — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 03:32:00 GMT

…and then there was “Innovate”. We’ll close this series of posts by discussing how the WinFS relational platform provides powerful, next generation tools to the application developer.

WinFS is built on a true relational store that all applications can leverage. Today, tons of popular apps lock their data into proprietary stores. This includes photo apps like Photoshop album, music apps like WMP and iTunes, financial apps like Quicken and Money, email apps like Outlook, and so on. By using WinFS, developers can concentrate on building rich applications without worrying about creating a storage silo. After all, WinFS can give applications a place for all their structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

In addition, WinFS will provide services like synchronization, notifications, rules, and backup/restore. The services provided by WinFS lead to a zero-admin and extremely reliable experience.

All the data in the store is accessible as CLR objects, so developer can leverage all their Visual Studio and .NET knowledge while building apps. Developers can also utilize our full query engine over their data and transport their data with our robust serialization support. This is a significant improvement over today’s cumbersome interaction with multiple forms and multiple locations of data.

So we’ve covered Unify, Organize, Explore, and now Innovate. Hopefully you have a better understanding of where you can go once you combine a traditional file system and traditional database.

As always, please post any questions or comments.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

Gotdotnet Birthday Party

WinFS Team — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:35:00 GMT

The Gotdotnet team is throwing a Birthday Party and all Gotdotnet users are invited! The party will occur at the Microsoft Visitor Center this Friday, November 18, 2005 between 6PM and 10PM. For more event details, see http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2005/11/14/492390.aspx or visit the Gotdotnet homepage.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

Unify, Organize, Explore, and Innovate. Oh my! (Part 3)

WinFS Team — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 03:52:00 GMT

Today we’ll chat about “Explore”. In discussing Unify and Organize, we already touched on a lot of Explore, but relational exploration is so cool that there is plenty to talk about.

WinFS gives you the ability to use relationships to find and display your data. In the PDC video, we showed an app that takes a range of dates and displays the location for your meetings on the map. As it draws the best route to drive between all your meetings, it adds icons that represent your contacts and important customers at their location on the map. Now, as you visualize your schedule, you can see who is close by and set up lunch.

Let’s walk through how WinFS made this possible. The app is able to query for all your appointments in a certain date range. It displays each appointment in the proper place on the map by using location of the meeting. Today it would be tough for a map application to do this, because your appointments are in a different application or maybe even more than one application. Assuming you can access the meetings programmatically, accessing the location may be hard. Your calendar app probably just has a field called “Location” that can contain an arbitrary string and would be tough to parse correctly. With WinFS, all your appointment information is in a single store with an API that let’s any application access the data uniformly.

Next, the application finds contacts and customers with high priority issues that are located close to where you will be and displays them on the map, by using the address of the contact. If you select a contact, the app can display some information for the person (a photo and contact info for example). From there, you can send them a mail to setup a lunch while you’re in town. Again this would be tough to do today; your contact information is probably in a silo that your map application can’t get to. Plus, chances are, your customers with high priority issues are tracked in a completely different application silo.

We’ve already talked about having a photo app that could sort and display the photos based on the people in them. In addition to this functionality, it would be pretty easy to enable the app to sort the photos by location (an image property), by event (an association to an evite or meeting) or even by the person that sent them to you.

WinFS is key because it has significantly rich data and new organizational constructs powered by a relational engine. I don’t have to worry about scale as my store grows, because WinFS is built on an enterprise scale relational engine. When users have millions of items, they won’t have to worry about their systems getting bogged down.

In reality, there are tons of really interesting relational exploration scenarios that WinFS enables:
- "Find me all the pictures and videos from my hockey games against the Iceoholics."
- "Find me all the mail from people I’m meeting with today."
- "Find me all the documents I need to review that my boss updated since our last meeting."
- "Show me all the previous Halloween party pictures I have of people that are invited this year."
- And so on

As you start to think about the difficulty of making these scenarios work today, the power of relationship exploration should become clear. Think about it, now I can find things without having any idea of where they are stored!

Hopefully, this starts to explain how WinFS helps you explore your data in ways you can’t today. Next time, we’ll finish up our value prop overview with “Innovate”.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

Unify, Organize, Explore, and Innovate. Oh my! (Part 2)

WinFS Team — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 01:14:00 GMT

Today we’ll talk about “Organize”. If you haven’t yet, you should check out Shishir’s WinFS PDC Presentation. He starts talking about Organize roughly 38 minutes into the talk. There is demo of the awesome “LifeJournal” app that shows the organization power of WinFS significantly better than my boring prose description will. :-)

Last time, we talked about contacts. This time, let’s talk about pictures. If you’re like me, you probably have tons of digital pictures on your computer. My photos are currently organized in a simple hierarchy. In “My Pictures”, I have a bunch of folders that are named something like, “2004-11 Thanksgiving”. Within this folder are all my photos from that holiday. I’m sure you can already see the limitations in this structure.

My latest challenge in actually using my pictures came the other day. My grandparents wanted me to send them some pictures of my fiancée and me. Wouldn’t it be really cool if I could just tell my computer, “Show me all the pictures that have Crissy and me in them”. Instead, I had to scan through my folders to see what events we were both at and copy all the pictures with both of us in them to a temp folder. Then I needed to go through the temp folder to pick which ones to send. Of course, I didn’t remember to delete the temp folder; so it’s eating up drive space. Good thing hard drives are so cheap nowadays.

With WinFS, I can relate my contacts to my photos, so I can easily query for all the pictures that are related to a set a contacts. A photo app built on WinFS could display all the pictures with Crissy and me in them. Then, I could select the good ones to email or print. If you’ve been playing with the Beta 1 bits, you know how easy it is to write an app with this behavior.

Plus, I can now easily check to see what photos I’ve already sent, so I don’t send the same ones again. How? Tell the computer to “show me the photos with both of us that I’ve sent to my grandparents.” All these containment relationships and associations would already be in my store.

Again, this applies to much more than pictures. I can associate a document with a meeting, or music and contacts to a party invite. And these aren’t keywords added to a file, these are associations between real items. All of these organization constructs are just waiting to be exploited by a WinFS app.

Also, all these types are extensible. So for my wedding guest list, I can extend the Contact type to have properties for “Sent ‘Save the Date’ card”, “Sent invitation”, “RSVP Received”, “# of Guests”, “Vegetarian meal?” and so on. That could make things significantly easier. Good thing I can do this with the Beta bits. If we had to wait for WinFS RTM to plan the wedding, I think Crissy would make sure that I wouldn’t be able to blog anymore. :-)

So that’s all for now about Organize. Next time, we’ll explore “Explore”.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

PDC content now online

WinFS Team — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:29:00 GMT

Hey everyone! All the Professional Developers Conference 2005 talks are now available.
- WinFS Overview
- WinFS Data Centric Applications using WPF and WinForms
- WinFS and ADO.NET
- All PDC 05 Videos
We’re looking forward to your comments!

Author: Vijay Bangaru

Unify, Organize, Explore, and Innovate. Oh my! (Part 1)

WinFS Team — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 03:33:00 GMT

Hopefully by now, you’ve gotten a chance to take a look at our PDC video and see how applications can use WinFS to do really cool things. I thought I would write a little bit about each of our value propositions, so we can dig in and see what’s really happening.

Today, let’s discuss “Unify” and how WinFS will take all the data in individual silos and move them into one place where all applications can access them. Personally, I like to think about this in terms of contacts. Right now, my contacts (friends, family, colleagues, etc.) are spread over a bunch of places. I have contact info in my cell phone, my home computer, my main box at work, my Outlook, my Hotmail account, my AOL IM account, my GMail account, on random post-it notes on my desk at work and home, and those business cards that come out of the dryer as crumpled balls of paper. Heck, I even have a number of printouts (written in Word) with all the guest info for my upcoming wedding.

In my mind, I roughly know where to go to get information: my cell phone has the most accurate phone numbers, my Hotmail account has all my college friends’ info, and so on.

So how does WinFS help fix this? With WinFS, I can move all my contact information into one central store. My applications can interact with this information and I can synchronize it wherever I want to. The obvious benefit is that I can go to one place reliably for the most up to date information. Now, I could easily add whoever I wanted to an Evite for a Halloween party. No more need for typing in email addresses or importing all my contacts (into yet another silo). When I order flowers for mom on her birthday, it’s just one click for me to fill out the information for the recipient.

In addition to being a central data store, WinFS can be your synchronization hub. I can sync between WinFS Stores and I can sync changes back and forth with legacy stores (like Outlook, PDAs, and cell phones). Now, I can have my latest contact info on my phone, make changes on the road, and sync that information back to WinFS. This, of course, enables some great offline experiences. When I’m doing work on vacation, I don’t need to worry about manually synchronizing my data with my desktop machine once I’m home. Now all my applications will behave like Outlook 11’s awesome offline mode.

Of course, this applies to all data; not just contacts. Now, all my calendar apps will show my Evite invites. My photos are now associated with contacts and events, so I can easily say, “Mail these photos to everyone that was at the event”. When you start adding email, RSS feeds, documents, music and everything else to this, it can get pretty exciting.

Next post, we’ll tackle “Organize”. Stay tuned…

Author: Vijay Bangaru

WinFS Backup/Restore at VSS Plugfest

WinFS Team — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:34:00 GMT

On Tuesday morning, I presented at VSS Plugfest, an event hosted by Microsoft where around 100 backup/restore application developers come together at our Redmond campus. The goal of my presentation was to describe the infrastructure that we are building for backing up and restoring WinFS stores and items, and get some feedback on the platform. Of course, before I could do this, I needed to explain WinFS: the vision, the scenarios, the data model, etc. Ordinarily presenting all this information in a short period of time is a tad challenging, but an achievable task (as we saw from our successful PDC sessions). However, I had only one hour to present everything!

I created a slide deck by borrowing from our PDC presentations, and then adding my WinFS backup/restore slides. I started the talk by showing the IWish video from the PDC and then summarized the recent WinFS announcements: Beta 1 shipped, we’ll RTM as an out-of-bound Windows component (as part of WinFX), we’ll have more betas, we’ll align with the rest of the Microsoft data stack, etc.

From there we went into an overview of the value props (unify, organize, explore, and innovate, oh my!) and how the WinFS architecture provides them. Of course, since this was a presentation from the backup app developer point of view, I had to pick and choose which parts of WinFS to drill down into and what to fly past. At one point, I think I said something along the lines of, “We also have these really cool and important Metadata Handler services, but I won’t talk about them today.” :-)

Understanding the difference between a file and an item is fairly important for a backup app developer, so I spent some time explaining how items will become the new center of user operations, and how associations relate items with either links or common value relationships. The next topic that I drilled into was how WinFS sits on NTFS, by introducing the idea of stores and shares, and how file backed items and their streams are stored on the user’s disk.

The last topic that I drilled into as part of the overview was the WinFS type system. I explained how a schema definition is used to generate code for the developer to program against and how this is packaged and deployed into a user store. I also discussed how schema associations can organize data and briefly touched on why a developer would want to extend a schema.

Tons of information already, but we’re only halfway through. :-) Most of the audience seemed really excited by WinFS (and maybe a little overwhelmed with the fire hose of information). Since my talk was immediately before lunch, there were maybe 1 or 2 folks that seemed distracted by the aroma of lunch that came wafting into the room. I can’t really blame them; it did smell pretty appetizing.

From here, we moved into the meat of presentation: the backup and restore platform. In addition to the platform we’re building, we are planning to integrate with available in-the-box OS backup applications. Store level backup will be available on both Vista and XP and Item level backup will be available on Vista. For store level backup, WinFS is providing a VSS writer that will expose WinFS Stores as components. The implication, of course, is that the backup granularity is the entire store. Users can’t directly restore individual items from a VSS snapshot. When a store is restored from backup, WinFS will detect this and perform any necessary processing.

Because item level granularity is important, we are building extensive item level backup and restore support. The item level backup allows user to revert a change to an item (“Oops, I didn’t mean to save that!”). On the other hand, the store level backup is more for the scenario of a broken hard drive and a user needing all his files back. The item level backup platform, at RTM, will be managed client side APIs. For Beta 1, we have stored procedures you can prototype with. However, by RTM, we may deprecate these procedures in favor of the managed API.

When we discuss item backup, we need to describe the item boundary. In other words, if all our data is related and linked, where does one item end and another item start? A WinFS item serialization contains the core item, outgoing links (just the link entity, not the linked item itself), extensions, embedded items, and incoming link IDs. We use the outgoing links and incoming link IDs to fix up the links between items at restore time. Backing up a folder is just like backing up any other item; it is important to note that serializing a folder does not serialize its contained items. This is because a folder item is just like any other item.

The last thing I touched was how WinFS provides the infrastructure for incremental backup of items. Essentially, a developer can easily get an enumeration of items that have changed since a given watermark and use this list to fetch items for backing up.

There were a bunch of good questions throughout my talk and during the small group discussion at the end. A lot of folks asked, “So are you a file system or a database?” In reality we’re both: “a relational file system”. Related to this question, some people asked, “Can a WinFS drive can be converted back to an NTFS drive?” There is no such thing as a “WinFS drive”. Since WinFS is built on top of and dependent on NTFS, we can’t replace it. One way to think of this is that WinFS is a subsystem on top of NTFS; you can have your WinFS store on the same drive as normal NTFS files.

I’ll be producing a whitepaper on WinFS Backup/Restore that will have all the details about the VSS Writer and the item level backup APIs. You can expect to see a blog post and link for it. In the meanwhile, if you have any questions, please let me know.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

WinFS Mailbox

WinFS Team — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 03:44:00 GMT

Hey Everyone. I realized that we needed a good way to reply to some of the comments and questions that we have been getting on the blog and mailed to us, so I’m starting a “WinFS Mailbox” type of post that I’ll do periodically. It’s just like the CBS Mailbag on Letterman, but not funny.

Q: Lloyd writes (I paraphrased and summarized a little on all the mails), “You mention about providing a file store for 3rd party apps. Does this mean that with WinFS I would be able to store my app’s data in a single file with internal database-like access and structure (which I can update with the WinFS API)? For example, I have an app now with its own file format. Can I expose the content of my file to other application through some WinFS magic?”
A: With WinFS you don’t need a separate file. Your data can be described as a WinFS schema and instances of that data stored in WinFS itself. You and other apps can operate on this data using the WinFS APIs. If you need to keep your separate file, you can write a metadata handler to promote and demote metadata between your file and the store. If you would like your file format to be modeled by multiple items (for example, your file is a collection of customer information, where each customer should be an individual item), you would want to write a sync adaptor to keep the data in both the store and the file up to date. We’ll have some posts here soon that provide more details. It’s very cool stuff, but I probably wouldn’t call it "magic". :-)

Q: Sean asks, “Wouldn't it be great for the WinFS team to host a site where developers could write applications to showcase WinFS, and post them on this site?”
A: You can use http://www.gotdotnet.com for this.

Q: Razielm writes, “Can I get a copy of the posters that were on the Channel9 video?”
A: Unfortunately, the answer is no. Those posters are part of our internal marketing and there aren’t plans to use them in external marketing.

Q: Mikael writes, “How and where are all the relations, keywords, etc. saved?”
A: The item properties are stored in the WinFS store as part of the item itself. WinFS has a concept of “links” which are an entity type with a source item and a target item that relate items. There is also the concept of “common value” relationships which are based on item properties. Navigation of common value relationships is a value based join.

Q: Mikael also asks, “How does WinFS get all the mails? Do I have to copy every mail into the WinFS Store?”
A: WinFS provides synchronization infrastructure that allows you to move information into and out of your WinFS store. Using this framework, developers can build a sync adapter to support synchronization with an external data store. So, for example, you can build a sync adapter to sync directly with a backend mail store, such as POP3 or IMAP4 servers. You can also build a sync adapter to synchronize data on the local machine. For example, an Outlook synchronization adapter can import your PIM data (emails, contacts, appointments) from Outlook. You should check out “StoreSpy” in the unsupported tools folder; this tool includes a one-way Outlook sync adapter. We’ll talk more about WinFS Sync in some upcoming posts.

Q: Mikael also asks, “Do I have to set all relations manually? How does WinFS know which document is created by which user?”
A: The relationship “setting” will depend on how it is modeled. A link will need to be set by something (i.e. metadata handler, sync adapter, application, etc.) A common value relationship, however, is just based on a join. WinFS depends on the application and user to provide the information to create links. In many cases, an application already has this data; for example, Office applications already have an “Author” property. In other cases, the user already knows this information and can set it. It would be fairly easy to get my primary contacts’ information moved into WinFS and then relate pictures to the contacts. In the future there could be many processes that could be used to relate your data: natural language processing of documents, concept extraction, face recognition for images, etc.

Q: Vince writes: “I'm curious how mail items & such fit into WinFS. Does Beta 1 work with the current (Outlook 2003) version of Outlook or do you need the Office 12 release?”
A: You’ll be able to use a sync adaptor (check out StoreSpy in the unsupported tools folder) to bring items from Outlook 2003. We are still investigating how WinFS and Office will fit together moving forward.

Q: Eirik asks, “I've made a few new schemas for some types, which has Store.Item as a base type. When I explore the WinFS Share all the items I've created with the new schemas has System.Store as types. Is there anything special I have to do to get that right?"
A: For Beta 1, you need to make sure that WinFS can find your schema client assembly by adding it to the GAC. Out of curiosity, what types did you create?

Q: Alex asks, “Will the data be owned by WinFS or can a schema be registered that makes new data available to WinFS, without needing to import a copy of that data into the WinFS database?”
A: The schema definition can exist independently of data; so a particular schema can be installed on a store even if that store does not contain any items of that type.

Q: Kazi writes, “Thanks, very good, and WinFS is really amazing, excellent technology.”
A: Thanks! The whole team appreciates your enthusiasm. :-)

Author: Vijay Bangaru

WinFS Overview Presentation at PDC 2005 – Repeat Session added

WinFS Team — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:07:00 GMT

Due to overwhelming interest around WinFS at PDC, a repeat session has been added for the WinFS Overview talk (DAT209: “WinFS” Future Directions: An Overview). The original session is still scheduled to be Wednesday at 1:45 pm PST in 515AB. The encore presentation will be Thursday at 5:15pm PST in 501ABC. For those of you at PDC, please let us know what you think by posting your thoughts here. Because we understand that not everyone can attend PDC, we’ll make sure to post a summary of the presentation here as well.

Author: Vijay Bangaru

Welcome

WinFS Team — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 06:51:00 GMT

Hello everyone and welcome to the WinFS team blog! My name is Vijay Bangaru and I’m a Program Manager on the WinFS product team. Today we are very excited to announce the release of WinFS Beta 1. As you probably know “WinFS” is the codename for the new relational file system for Windows that provides a data platform for desktop developers.

Our Beta 1 release is a preview of WinFS, Microsoft’s platform that allows developers and users to unify, organize, and explore data in ways they couldn’t before. WinFS is a critical piece of Microsoft’s integrated data initiative. (Integrated data initiative is a term used to refer to a group of technologies whose goal is to provide better integration for data, since much of user data is locked in individual application silos).

This release contains the core of the capabilities we’ll have at RTM. The WinFS data model allows the definition of rich data concepts like items and relationships. It also includes the object APIs that help developers program with this new data model, along with a set of core schemas that can be used to bootstrap development and to share data with other applications. WinFS Beta 1 provides the infrastructure for extending these schemas and building synchronization adaptors to get data in and out of WinFS. Also included is the beginning of the Windows Explorer support to allow WinFS items to appear.

Our Beta 1 runs on XPSP2. We are planning on releasing regular Betas and CTP releases. WinFS will be in Beta as Windows Vista ships. When WinFS RTMs, we will be available for download much like the .NET Framework is today.

Obviously, the team is thrilled with the release. We wanted to get these bits out so that we can get good feedback and bake it into the product. So we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback either here at the blog, via comments, or at our newsgroup. We’ll be posting frequently to this site, so subscribe or come back and visit us often.

Author: Vijay Bangaru