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WinFS to be available in WinXP

Posted by Hemos on from the by-bits-and-dribbles dept.

ScooterMcGoo writes "According to a Microsoft Watch blog, WinFS is being back ported for Windows XP. From TFA: WinFS isn't dead, Tom Rizzo, Microsoft's director of product management for SQL Server, recently told Microsoft Watch. In fact, Microsoft is planning to provide an update on the technology at this year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in September, he said. Rizzo said that Microsoft is busily back-porting the WinFS file-system technology to Windows XP. It's unclear if Microsoft also is porting WinFS to Windows Server 2003, but such a move would be likely, given that the Redmond software vendor is doing so with Avalon and Indigo."

11 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Sure... by Quasar1999 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'll believe it when I see it... my sources inside MS (and no, I ain't giving any proof, so believe me or not, I don't give a shit), say that there are very hard deadlines for Longhorn, with features being left out if they don't meet certain benchmarks, etc... so to hear that they are now taking something, and wasting resources back porting it? Especially when they first said it would be dropped from longhorn? I call Bull..

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    1. Re:Sure... by antoy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Especially when they first said it would be dropped from longhorn? I call Bull..

      It has been dropped from Longhorn. WinFS is now an entirely separate project and, simply, all connections that existed between Longhorn and WinFS are being removed.

      Just because Longhorn has very hard deadlines doesn't mean that masses of MS developers swarmed into the project, like some sort of a really nerdy LOTR scene. WinFS was shown the door regarding Longhorn inclusion, but that doesn't mean the WinFS team was dismantled. It will continue, but with slightly different targets and no consumer-side deadline.

      I don't see why it's hard to see how a company can work two projects in parallel, especially a company the size of Microsoft. They probably have hundreds.

  2. Re:WinFS by Ironsides · · Score: 5, Informative

    I mean, jesus, its a file system, not a damn search engine.

    Quote from MS on WinFS:
    One of the monumental problems organizations face today is aggregating information that's stored in disparate formats. Knowledge workers have long wanted to be able to search for content independent of format. WinFS allows the user to perform searches based on the metadata of the stored item, regardless of what type of file it is or which application created it.

    So not only is it a file system, it is also a search engine.

    Source:http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/winfs/

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  3. Re:And I care why? by evn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Despite the unforutnate name, WinFS is a service that runs above the filesystem. The data is still stored on a plain old NTFS partition(s).

    For traditional file-based data, such as text documents, audio tracks, and video clips, WinFS is the new Windows file system. Typically, you will store the main data of a file, the file stream, as a file on an NTFS volume. However, whenever you call an API that changes or adds items with NTFS file stream parts, WinFS extracts the metadata from the stream and adds the metadata to the WinFS store.

    source: Microsoft's WinFS developer page

    The data is still just as (in)accessible as it's always been. The meta data is locked away in the WinFS store but we haven't been using that all this time so it's not like we're going to be any worse off.

    as for writting NTFS, I suggest you take a look at captive NTFS which lets you read and write your NTFS partitions in Linux with the same confidence that you do in Windows.

  4. Re:What's left for Longhorn? by SmokeHalo · · Score: 3, Informative
    The remaining functionality is called "fundamentals". Here's a link to an episode of The .NET Show that has a discussion of these "fundamentals". From the link:
    Longhorn "Fundamentals" is an important part of what we feel is part of the core experience of Longhorn. It includes User Experience, System Security, Application Deployment, System Manageability, as well as many other features and capabilities.
    Sounds perfectly nondescript to me, simply some buzzwords thrown together to give the impression of state-of-the-art design. Of course, I haven't watched the "show".
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  5. Re:How about Rieser FS (or JFS or XFS) by wrecked · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not Reiser4, but there are some tools to access Reiser3 from Windows: RFSTool, and YAReG, a graphical frontend for RFSTool.

  6. Re:How about Rieser FS (or JFS or XFS) by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, Windows most likely can support that. I mean, it does support ext3, ReiserFS, and even ext2 with write support. So I think there's nothing technically in the way. The problem is probably being lack of driver developers. ;-)

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  7. link to that book by morcheeba · · Score: 4, Informative

    The book you're talking about is "Practical File System Design with the Be file system".

    Here's the slashdot article on it and here's a pdf of the book direct from the author's site.

    It looks interesting, but it's been on my to-read list for a while.

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  8. WinFS is a horrible fix for a stupid mistake by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 3, Informative

    I recall my good ol' DOS times.

    Here's more or less a list of my directories:
    C:\DOCS
    C:\DOCS\HOMEWORK
    C:\DOCS\J OB
    C:\GAMES
    C:\GAMES\3D
    C:\GAMES\ADVENTUR
    C:\G AMES\PLATFORM
    C:\LENG\BC
    C:\LENG\TP
    C:\PICS
    C: \WIN95 -- my custom "WINDOWS" directory.
    C:\WIN98
    C:\WP

    So I could organize myself. Now, do you know what Microsoft did?

    C:\Program Files\app 1
    C:\Program Files\app 2
    C:\Program Files\app 3 ...
    C:\Program Files\app 9,999

    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\doc1
    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\doc2
    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\doc3 ...
    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\docN

    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\My Images\img1
    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\My Images\img2 ...
    C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\My Images\imgN

    Suddenly, the worst happens. My start menu is erased! Or my config got erased!

    *cries* WAH!!! I lost one of my files! Where is it? They were on "My Documents", I swear!!

    If Microsoft had ALLOWED the users to specify CATEGORIES for program installations... as in "Create Category", etc and made THIS feature an integral part of the system
    ("A certified WinXP application will present the "category" dialogue when installing something),
    we wouldn't NEED WinFS at all.

    Now that I think of it, here's a new motto for Microsoft:
    "What do you want to hide today?"

  9. Re:Ummm... dupe from a while ago? by shoptroll · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was lazy and should've grabbed a link from the old article. Here it is: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/27/195025 7&tid=201&tid=1

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  10. Re:NTFS Sucks by hunterx11 · · Score: 3, Informative
    The only filesystem that really doesn't need defragmenting is one that runs a defragmenter all the time as a background process

    Or one that defragments files when you open them, like HFS+.

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