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WinFS to be available in WinXP
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."
I'd love to be able to use a filesystem that can be seen in a dual-boot environment; that's better than FAT32 or FAT16; but those are really the only choices now.
If everything will be back-ported to XP and Windows 2003, how does Microsoft plan to make any money off Longhorn, which has cost the company a lot in development time and money?
Do they plan on back-porting the first versions of Avalon, Indigo and WinFS, and then providing feature updates to Longhorn only, forcing customers to update? Or is Longhorn really just XP SP3?
It's important to Microsoft as a way of preventing Google Desktop Search and Copernic from gaining mindshare and installed base before they introduce their final version in Longhorn
Incidentally, Copernic 1.5 beta now supports Mozilla Thunderbirds email and contacts and Firefox history and bookmarks - and does it well. This is a double threat to Microsoft, as their vision sees WinFS as a factor which ties people to Outlook and IE6/7
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Yes, there is a hard deadline for Longhorn, and that is a good thing.
That said, WinFS will not make it into the hard deadline for Longhorn. That said, it will be available freely as a download, and possible as part of Windows Update, for Longhorn and other operating systems including XP and, yes, Win2003, some time after the Longhorn deadline.
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Actually, no.
From how I understand it, WinFS will actually be a layer of abstraction above whatever underlying filesystem (FAT32/NTFS) the system is running on. It won't be a new filesystem at all. It holds metadata about each file and makes it easier and faster to find things. Much like the aforementioned Beagle project.
And ext3's journalling is quite different from what WinFS attempts to accomplish. Journalling basically makes it so, like you say, files aren't lost and you don't have to do a time-consuming fsck whenever the partition is not unmounted cleanly like with ext2.