Microsoft Kills WinFS... Once Again!

WinFS file system is a project that has not been shelved as yet, but it will undoubtedly not see the light of day in store in the upcoming months, and this although WinFS Beta 1 was launched on the marker back in August 2005. Announced as a main advantage of Vista over other operating systems, WINdows Future Storage was Microsoft's aim at building a storage system on top of NTFS to provide users with an object-oriented application that would combine a relational database and XML meta-data. WinFS offers a platform to index and group data and an advanced search engine that would improve the user's daily routine.

"Is WinFS dead? Yes and no. Yes, we are not going to ship WinFS as a separate, monolithic software component," said Quentin Clark, WinFS product unit manager for SQL Server. "But the answer is also no. The vision [of WinFS] remains alive, and we are moving the technology forward. But some of the technology, especially the end-user value points, are not ready. And we're going to continue to work on that in incubation."

Although it will not revolutionize the storage file system in Windows Vista, Microsoft representatives claim that the essential key parts of WinFS were integrated in Vista's file system. Future plans for this product seem to point to an Information Explorer Microsoft project that would be based on Windows Future Storage and Windows Presentation Foundation.