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WinsFS Articles

PC Pro - 08/25/2006 - Exit WinFX, enter .NET 3 - WinFS was removed as a core part of Vista last summer, although at that time Microsoft was promising it would continue to be developed "out of band" and be delivered later as a download. Sadly, this wasn't to be: this June, Microsoft announced that WinFS has been cancelled, although some of its features and technologies may make it into Katmai (codename for the next version of SQL Server - probably 2010 at this rate) as well as ADO.NET. The long-promised fully relational file system appears to be dead.

Application Development Trends - 7/31/2006 - Adesso Looks to Mobilize App Development - This product appears to do some of the things that Microsoft's WinFS file system was intended do?  It does. Think of this as WinFS today.

INFOWORLD DAILY - July 06, 2006 - Microsoft supports ODF in Office
 - WinFS failed to acknowledge the emergence and transformative power of social computing," Udell points out in Evolving WinFS still needs to embrace the Web. Just don't call WinFS dead. "If there must be an epitaph, let's write it for personal computing rather than WinFS."

Government Computer News - 07/05/06 - The lost promise of WinFS
 - Last month, Microsoft developer Quentin Clark announced in a blog that the company would not release the second beta version of WinFS, its once-highly anticipated next generation relational file system technology. Instead, it will be rolled into the next version of SQL Server (So sensational was the news that Clark had to follow up with some clarifications the following week).

vnunet.com - 07/05/2006 - Axing WinFS signals new web focus for Microsoft - "Despite the company's reluctance to point it out, we believe that Ray Ozzie is having an immediate positive impact by making the decision to end WinFS. He should gain respect internally and externally as a result."

ComputerWeekly.com - 7/4/06 - WinFS dropped as Office 2007 hit by further delays - Microsoft said, "We are changing the delivery strategy for WinFS technologies and it will not ship as a standalone feature. However, the vision for integrated storage is alive and well. Microsoft will instead include the WinFS support for un­structured data and auto-admin work and deliver features in the next release of MS SQL Server, codenamed Katmai, as part of its Data Platform Vision strategy."

InformationWeek - 7/3/2006 - Microsoft's WinFS File System Is Gone But Not Forgotten - It's not junking the technology entirely. Microsoft is plucking the "more mature" parts of WinFS for further development, Thomas says. The next version of SQL Server will be able to extract metadata from documents and photos on a PC and relate those files to back-end business data.

The Guardian - 6/29/2006 - Why WinFS had to vanish -  The three big ideas behind WinFS were to unify storage, make it searchable, and make it accessible to applications. Unified storage meant things like songs, photos, word documents, email messages, calendars and so on could all be held in the same database.

CIO - 6/272006 - Microsoft WinFS to Find a Home in SQL Server - The company now will include WinFS in the next version of its SQL Server database, code-named Katmai, according to an entry on the WinFS team blog by Quentin Clark, director of program management at Microsoft. WinFS will handle the storing of unstructured data and auto-administration features of SQL Server, he wrote.

PC Worlds - 6/26/2006 - Microsoft's WinFS: Dead Again (Sigh) -  Here's Bill Gates talking up WinFS in a 2003 speech, before developers who were clearly salivating to get their hands on it:
"WinFS--this is unified storage. Some of you here have heard me talk about unified storage for more than a decade. The idea of taking the XML flexibility, database technology, getting it into the file system: that's been a Holy Grail for me for quite some time. And here it is. Thank goodness we have got the powerful systems to be able to do this thing. Thank goodness we have the evolution around XML and user interface capabilities, so that this can all come together."


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WinFS definition from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In computing, WinFS is the code name of a Windows storage subsystem, being developed by Microsoft for use on its Windows operating system. WinFS is not a file system, but a file storage subsystem that will run ontop of the NTFS file system, indexing the content of the drive.

... WinFS tries to bridge the worlds of traditional relational databases, objects, XML, and file systems of unstructured documents with the concept of metadata over files. Rather than representing a file with a single name, WinFS aims to represent individual domain objects - e.g. e-mails, address book entries - with indexed and searchable context and keyword information.