WinFS gets early release for PDC

Tom Rizzo of Microsoft’s WinFS team blogs the early release of WinFS Beta 1. WinFS is a relational file system that can store documents, email messages, photos and multimedia files, plus structured data from applications in a common way.

“There are some exciting things with this beta including Windows XP support. The end game for WinFS stays the same which is that WinFS will be in beta when Windows Vista ships. You’ll learn a lot more about WinFS at PDC [Professional Developers Conference],” said Rizzo.

So, WinFS will not be a part of the next version of Windows, Windows Vista, when it ships at the end of next year, “but will be available to the operating system as an add-on release sometime in 2007,” says Quentin Clark, director of program management for WinFS at Microsoft.

Microsoft is putting a lot of care into WinFS because the file system will drive Windows for a whole new generation of users, he says. “As a file system technology, it’s important we get it right.”

Over time, Microsoft plans to migrate the databases inside its own applications, such as Outlook, to WinFS. “Long term, we believe apps that contain their own data silos will be retooled for WinFS,” Clark says. “Beta 1 is really the first step.”