In a posting to a Microsoft blog, developer Quentin Clark said that some parts of WinFS would make it to other products, but added: We are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release.
WinFS was one of Bill Gates’ pet projects, and it is difficult not to read the news of its demise in the context of Gates’ decision a week earlier to share the role of chief software architect with heir apparent Ray Ozzie.
But the WinFS technology developed to date is not completely dead.
With most of our effort now working towards productizing mature aspects of the WinFS project into SQL and ADO.NET, we do not need to deliver a separate WinFS offering, Clark wrote.
ADO.NET’s Entity Framework, for example, will provide a way for .NET developers to work with types of relational data stores more easily and without having to hand-code much of the plumbing.
WinFS was going to provide a relational file management overlay to NTFS, the existing Windows file system, allowing the concept of entities, and the relationships between them, to be defined, so applications can more easily find and use each others’ data.
Back in 2003, Bill Gates called WinFS the Holy Grail of Vista, which was then referred to by the codename Longhorn.
Along with projects Indigo and Avalon, now known as the Windows Communication Framework and the Windows Presentation Foundation respectively, WinFS was originally one of the three key legs of the Vista stool.
It was wiped from the Vista roadmap in summer 2004, with the idea being that it would be published as a Vista and XP add-on, possibly in 2008. Now it appears to have been flushed completely, at least as a distinct product.
In search, Microsoft is pursuing Windows Live Desktop Search, its answer to the two-year-old wave of desktop search products, notably Google Desktop, making similar features in WinFS less critical.
Precisely why the project was canned is not yet entirely clear, but it certainly could cause embarrassment for Bill Gates, who only a week earlier was promising to keep pushing the technology.
In an interview with CNet following his announcement that he would share and eventually pass the chief software architect role to Ray Ozzie, Gates promised to lobby Ozzie to carry the torch for WinFS.
I’m really going to infect Ray with my deep belief in unified storage, so that any hour I’m not here, he is carrying that torch, Gates told CNet. This is one that people like to give me a hard time about, because it’s taken a long time, and some of the moves we’ve made in that direction have shown what a challenge it is. I still very, very much believe in that.
