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September 01, 2005
WinFS is..... a File System. Beta Preview with Pics.
Microsoft has released an official beta of the next generation file system for Windows, WinFS, to members of MSDN. My boss, being a very nice guy who likes to keep informed about forthcoming products, downloaded a copy of the beta and gave it to me to play with. My conclusion, after very brief testing; WinFS is just another file system.
Perhaps that's damning with faint praise? But then, that's all it should be. This is a product that MS has been working on since the days of NT 2, and seemingly has been restarted from scratch several times (though I haven't been following its progress actively). It's important to realize that Microsoft would spend any amount of time and money to ensure backwards compatibility with existing applications. After all, if Windows didn't have the most programs available to run on it, more people would be willing to switch away. Microsoft has managed to protect the hegemony but in the process of building all that backwards compatibility they extended the product development cycle beyond credible belief.
The database functionality on the back end of the system is (mostly) invisible to end users. Meta data about files (image size, mime types, internal content) is made available to programmers through some new API's, but older programs should continue to work with the file system without modification. However, it doesn't always work quite right, see pics at the end for an example of 'save as' gone awry.
Boring Install Pics
WinFS Store on the File System
Quirks
Attempting to copy a file that shares a name with a file already in the store. Because the files were created at different times and are different sizes one might expect a database to be able to differentiate between the two. I believe (hope) this is an example of backwards compatibility in effect.
Here we see that WinFS has created a network share on my hard drive without prompting the user... This occurred when I used 'Save as' from within Paint.NET while working on a file that was within a WinFS Store.
Posted by ashusta at September 1, 2005 02:35 PM