A file system surprise from Redmond - WinFS beta released
Almost a year to the day after Microsoft announced that it would be pulled from the initial releases of the Longhorn client (whoops Vista) and server, WinFS has – to the surprise of many, myself included – reared its head again. It was widely anticipated that the “new relational file system for Windows” would not see the light of day until late 2006. Unsurprisingly, there has already been considerable coverage (here, here and here for example) and I won’t replicate what has already been said. However, there were a couple of things from the new WinFS team blog that caught my eye. Vijay Bangaru (Program Manager for the WinFS product team) describes WinFS as a “platform for desktop developers”. That’s certainly true but what about the server? WinFS has just as important a role to play there – not least for the work that Microsoft is doing with the Microsoft Business Framework which was one of the casualties when WinFS was originally pulled from the initial Longhorn wave – particularly when used together with WinFS on the client. As with the Windows Communications Foundation (aka Indigo) and Windows Presentation Framework (aka Avalon), WinFS Beta 1 will be made available on Windows XP SP2 but not, as far as I can tell, on Windows Server 2003 (unlike WCF and WPF). Perhaps I am reading too much into this but I do wonder whether WinFS is destined to be a desktop-only capability. Peter Spiro, General Manager in the SQL Server team responsible for the WinFS team, refers to a Microsoft-internal meeting a couple of years ago when Ray Ozzie discussed how the Groove team had built its own storage system and that Microsoft should do the same. I wonder whether the accelerated delivery of this WinFS beta has anything to do with the fact that Ray Ozzie is now firmly ensconced in Redmond?
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