Rants Tagged with “WinFS”
1 2 > >> (Total Pages: 2/Total Results: 15)
Hey everybody look...its not a Silverlight post ;)
I just finished listening to this interview with Peter Spiro. Peter Spiro discusses leadership in the SQL Server team, Shackleton and WinFS. Its worth a listen as he's one of the smartest guys in MS (in my opinion) and has enough cred to back it up.
One concern is that it seems that his discussion of WinFS (which he corrects the interviewer and calls a "failure") is cut short. There is a hard break (the only one I noticed) about at 40 minutes into the video, in the middle of the WinFS discussion. I'd love to get a hold of what's missing, but I don't see that happening. Hopefully it was just a rambling discussion of esoteric topics that was cut for clarity, but I can't help but feel like we're missing 18 1/2 minutes of tape.
In this blog entry by James Kyton, he talks about the next versions of Windows (Fiji and Vienna...in that order). Fuji seems to be Vista 1.1 as it is adding features that were dropped. Of most interest to me is the fact that the WinFS name is rearing is head again. The article states that for Fiji:
"WinFS will be applied over NTFS to give us Virtual Folders (or maybe just Saved Searches)"
And for Vienna:
"WinFS (or its sucessor) will replace NTFS. No more drives, or files/folders location to worry about. File Management will be done through applications, which will automaticlly index and sort the files they support."
No timeframes were mentioned, but I've been waiting for WinFS since Cairo was announced so I am not holding my breath. It still seems to me that creating WinFS by using SQL Server technology makes sense, but until row-level security in the SQL Server engine is supported I don't see how that will happen.
What do you think?
UPDATE: Fixed mispelling of Fiji. Thanks whoever pointed it out.
This blog entry is interesting...WinFS technology is being folded into the next gen
SQL Server and
ADO.NET. Interesting?
I have built a test-vista machine to do some WinFX stuff on and it got me wondering...why do I need to run the WinFX runtime installation on Vista? Isn't this supposed to be pre-installed? Aren't some built-in Vista apps already using WinFX? I am so confused. Anyone know?
While I think its interesting that the new drop of WinFS will be shown at the upcoming TechEd (too bad I couldn't get there this year), what I have seen so far doesn't have me too excited. I played with Beta 1 a bit and was certainly a FanBoy for the early WinFS with Vista before that got yanked.
It looks like WinFS is becoming just another data store (to sit aside SQL Server and Access) with specific hooks for certain types of data. If this is the case and WinFS will not be the next File System (NTFS.next), then I don't know why we should be excited. The "Cairo" promise was a huge promise, but in the decade since, it would seem plausable that someone could make that happen.
I will sit here with my pessemistic hat on for a while until I get my hands on Beta 2. Hopefully I will be proven wrong.
I've spent a couple hours digging back into the new WinFS. So far it seems interesting, but only as a new datastore. It doesn't seem to be trying to be the Object File System from teh Cairo days, though that may be because of it's bolted-on status on XP. It is still stored in a SQL Server engine, so that is good. It also looks like the actual files (not just the metadata) are being stored there.
I will probably update my WinFS DB Explorer and release it next week with the new bits. Being able to look at the DB would be fun!
As any of my readers will probably know, WinFS is a hot/sore spot for me. To my surprise, Tom Rizzo dropped a Beta of WinFS (and it supposedly is backwards compatible with XP) on MSDN a day or two ago.
Interestingly is that WinFS will not be included in Vista, but be released post-Vista. It does seem that the 2010 date may be wrong (good!). If I get a chance to dig into it i'll post what I find here.
Since MacWorld, I've been delving through some of the public docs about "Spotlight". Metadata annotation of files, at OS level, integrated into system commands (e.g. ls). Sounds a lot like WinFS, but maybe less heavy handed. I wonder how it will perform. It might be a good model for how the WinFS team look at the metadata/file problem instead of trying to embed
SQL Server into the OS.
I really like this post by Adam Barr in response to Scoble's blog about what happened to WinFS. I think Adam is right on with his take on how long-term projects are scheduled. Whether this is what happened to WinFS or not is up to speculation...ok...let me speculate.
WinFS was not a simple project with no or few dependencies. It was dependent on the Yukon team including features that they needed in the core of the storage engine (e.g. Row-level security). At the same time they had to convince the Longhorn UI folks to use WinFS for their desktop changes. Of course, the problem here is pulling from one team, and giving the other team an incomplete tool. WinFS was doomed to failure because of this.
When I wrote the two WinFS articles (1 and 2) for MSDN.com, I tried to make sense of the data model they had come up with. Frankly, the data model between drops one and two were very different, with the second drop being barely usable (from an intuitive point of view, not a bug point of view). So carving out stubs that the LH UI team could use just confused the situation IMHO.
Don't get me wrong, I know what they were trying to do with WinFS was hard, very hard. Sure anyone can write a property based data store, but making it fast enough and feature complete to compete with NTFS is a huge challenge.
According to this article,
Microsoft doesn't think that WinFS will ship until after Longhorn's Server product. That version of Windows (codenamed Cairo...um...I mean Blackcomb) won't show up this decade. I wonder if that matches up with row level security in
SQL Server... We will have to wait and see!
