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."

MSDN WINFS Blog -  June 23, 2006 -  WinFS Update -  We are choosing now to take the unstructured data support and auto-admin work and deliver it in the next release of MS SQL Server, codenamed Katmai. With most of our effort now working towards productizing mature aspects of the WinFS project into SQL and ADO.NET, we do not need to deliver a separate WinFS offering.

ddj.com - May 23, 2006
Microsoft Posts Office 2007 Beta 2 Bits - Just in time for Bill Gates' WinHEC keynote, testers on Tuesday got product keys to Microsoft Office 2007 beta 2. Microsoft also is slated to preview WinFS beta 2 at Tech Ed 2006.

BetaNews - May 23, 2006
WinFS Beta 2 to Appear at TechEd - - WinFS, or Windows File Store, is Microsoft's new SQL-based file system technology that will be released as an add-on shortly after Windows Vista.

PC Pro (subscription) - UK - May 5, 2006
WinFS arrives! - So what is WinFS, and what exactly has been released? Well, WinFS is set to become many things, depending on where on the timeline for the next five years you're looking. Be in no doubt, however, that it will end up becoming the single unified 'digital soup' into which all data is poured under future Windows versions.

ZDNet News - March 28, 2006
Gates scopes out the business landscape - When does it get to a point where it's just too hard to add new features, such as a new file system like WinFS, into Windows?

Network World - 2/27/2006
The dream OS - An OS tester fantasizes about building the best, most stable operating system.. Give us our choice of WinFS, or Reiser or ZFS. Cross-license them - free - to each other and everyone so we no longer must appease proprietary, standards-less, incompatible applications.

Processor - 2/3/2006 - Vol.28 Issue 5
Searchable Storage Means Better Governance - A final product that will advance the searchable storage market is Microsoft WinFS... WinFS will extract metadata from all files stored on WinFS volumes, making the data more searchable through third-party enterprise tools and Microsoft Desktop Search.

Processor - 1/27/2006
Microsoft Renames Blackcomb  - Some of the features that Microsoft pulled out of Vista may be included in Vienna, including WinFS, a new relational file system.

Microsoft - 12/2005
The WinFS Files: Divide et Impera - WinFS enables developers to think about data as data, not as specific data formats. ... Actually, I want to do all the typical things one does with data, such as create, retrieve, update, delete, save, share, synchronize, copy, move, restrict access, respond to notifications, etc. Well, with WinFS you get these common behaviors by using the WinFS API.

SYS-CON Media - 12/2/2005
Information Storage & Security Journal: What's in Store For 2006? - Microsoft has taken WinFS, its new file system, out of the first release of its next operating system.

InformationWeek - 11/18/2005
The Future Of Windows - A sneak peek at Vista, Blackcomb, and beyond.... It's also likely that when Longhorn Server ships in 2007, it will include Microsoft's new WinFS file storage system.

SQL Server Mag - 11/2005
Value in Integration: SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 - We put a lot of super strong engineers on WinFS, and they pushed us to include certain features.

ZDnet News - 11/8/2005
Ballmer: Here's why Microsoft is different - We had an original design point that there would be a new version of Office and a new version of Windows--Vista--that would be co-dependent. We chose to change that decision at the time we did the Vista reset and decided to separate WinFS and a few other things.

SQL Server Mag - 11/2005
Value in Integration: SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 - We put a lot of super strong engineers on WinFS, and they pushed us to include certain features.

CBC News - 10/21/2005
At age 30, Microsoft tries to untangle bureaucratic snags with a shakeup - ...When Vista, Microsoft's first significant Windows upgrade since 2001, is released next year after serious delays, it will initially lack a hotly anticipated data management system called WinFS that would let people swiftly find documents, pictures or e-mails.

Information Week - 10/19/2005
Microsoft promises "innovation" roadmaps - ...We made a call that the integration challenge of trying to bring together a new operating system with a new presentation system, file system, user interface, communication system and have all those things be co-dependent was not good.

Redmond Magazine - 10/2005
WinFS Questions Persist - A year after pulling the "WinFS" storage subsystem from the Windows "Longhorn" (now Vista) client operating system, Microsoft posted a surprise early beta of the technology for developers on MSDN, once again opening up questions about the product's future.

ABC News - 10/10/2005
Windows Into the Future - ..With WinFS, applications can take advantage of one common schema set that they can manipulate, and contents can be joined with other types of business information anything from personnel records to purchase orders.

techspot - 9/30/2005
XP SP3: After Vista - ...There are some rumors about what may be included in SP3, including possibly WinFS, originally scheduled to be released with Vista but delayed. WinFS is the  metadata-style filesystem designed to be the successor to NTFS.

Building WinFS Solutions - Learn more about WinFS, the new relational file system for Windows. As an essential piece of Microsoft’s Integrated Storage strategy, WinFS bridges the gap between file systems and databases and provides a unified, rich programming platform for all data: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured.

Developers Get First Look at WinFS - WinFS, which stands for Windows Future Storage, is an integrated data storage subsystem of the Windows operating system. Microsoft aims to bridge the gap between traditional OS file systems and relational databases by bringing the flexibility, organizational and querying capabilities of databases to the file system.

Getting to Know WinFS - Essentially a relational database index wrapped around the NT File System (NTFS) , WinFS seeks to index all file information on the computer or network -- whether it's a Word document or an e-mail, video clip, RSS note or audio file -- and find connections between them to make finding and manipulating gigabytes of information easier to manage.

Microsoft betas Vista-bound WinFS file system - The relational file system allows data held within individual applications to be accessed by the entire system. This 'Item Data Model' means complex queries such as 'show me all mail from people I am meeting with this week' can be formulated.

Microsoft unexpectedly releases WinFS into Beta 1 cycle - Putting an end to speculation that Microsoft had indefinitely postponed, or even cancelled, the proposed contextual file system that chairman Bill Gates introduced in October 2003, the company this morning released Beta 1 of WinFS.

Microsoft's WinFS waves files goodbye - Instead of looking for files, WinFS identifies relationships between items such as images, documents, email messages and calendar appointments, allowing the user to search for objects dispersed over several applications.

Next SQL Server Stop: Katmai - Another PDC, another code name. Or Two. As in Katmai. That's the internal name for the successor to Yukon--the soon-to-ship SQL Server 2005. In a PDC interview with CRN, none other than Bill Gates said that the WinFS server implementation will come sometime in the "Katmai" wave. At that time the WinFS client and server technology will unify all the various data repositories, he said.

WinFS and social information management - The rich file system has come a long way since 1993.

WinFS defintion 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. The codename WinFS stands for Windows Future Storage but will likely change before the technology is released.

WinFS Examples in Action at PDC - WinFS takes a SQL engine and marries it with NTFS, storing metadata for all files on a system, as well as structured data such as contacts, calendars and more.

Microsoft's WinFS waves files goodbye - "I can go into one application and build a list of people and go into another application and show their messages," Shishir Mehrotra, who is responsible for WinFS product planning, said during a session at the Microsoft developer event.