[Mono-list] WinFS

[Thomas Krause]

Hey

 

Two days ago, Microsoft released a Beta 1 of WinFS, the Windows Future
Storage (currently runs only on WinXP SP2, download available only through
MSDN subscriptions at the moment). For a good demonstration video, see:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=106356

 

For me as a developer WinFS is a great technology, because every Item in
WinFS is directly exposed as an instance of a specific item type in .NET. A
contact item for example is directly accessible through a Contact item type,
which is a normal class in .NET with members like FullName, Address, etc.
Since Microsoft also wants to use WinFS to store small item like E-Mail,
Contacts, Meetings, etc. this technology could also prevent applications
from inventing its own custom formats for contacts, etc. instead of using
the items that WinFS provides. So I could see my same contacts in Outlook,
Miranda, whatever.

Since the content of items is directly exposed through properties in the
file system, you can do very rich searches like "Show me the Subjects of all
E-Mails from contacts that I had a meeting with in the last 30 days"
directly in Windows or in any other application that supports WinFS.

Another great thing is the possibility to store relations between items in
the file system. For example every Item can have a relation to one or more
folder in which the Item should reside, but relations can also be of other
types, so that you can relate a picture to the persons/contacts that you can
see on that picture. These relations can of course also be used in searches
("Show me all pictures of Person x").

WinFS is based on Microsoft SQL Server technology and NTFS file streams and
is planned to be released in Q3 2007 as an AddOn to Vista (alias Longhorn)
and maybe Windows XP also. 

 

Well, as you hopefully see now, WinFS is a great enhancement compared to
traditional file systems.

 

So IME WinFS should not only be a great technology on Windows, but it should
also be ported to other environments as a part of the Mono project. What are
your opinions about that? From all "Longhorn technologies" that were
presented from Microsoft at the PDC 2003, for me WinFS was the most
important technology of all. For me object oriented file systems like WinFS
are the next logical step and you can compare that to the step to object
orientation in programming languages.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC there was an attempt (or at least the
idea) from Mono to port other technologies like Avalon and Indigo, but
Microsoft didn't wanted that and for some reasons Mono listened to that or
something like that (again, correct me if I'm wrong here). So is there any
legal problem of porting such technologies to other platforms?

 

Thank you very much,

Thomas Krause

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