WinFS No Longer Part of Windows Roadmap

Published: June 28, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft no longer has concrete plans to incorporate the next-generation Windows File System, or WinFS, into the Windows operating system, but instead will incorporate the technology into other products, including the next release of SQL Server, codenamed "Katmai," according to a posting on a company blog site last week. To some people, it might appear that Microsoft is sounding the death-knell for the much-maligned piece of software engineering, but Microsoft maintains it's a new beginning.

On the WinFS Team Blog, WinFS team leader Quentin Clark provided an update on WinFS, the revolutionary file system that was to be based on the SQL Server database and XML, and which was supposed to provide an entirely new data model that would radically change the way applications are written and used within the Windows operating system.

Clark says the team has made some real accomplishments during the development of WinFS, including developing the Entities feature for the next release of ADO.NET (which was originally planned to be a feature of the WinFS API, Clark says), and the integration of unstructured data into the relational database and other improvements in automation "that make the database 'just work' with no DBAs," he says.

Somewhere along the way, Microsoft's WinFS plans changed in a major way. "We are choosing now to take the unstructured data support and auto-admin work and deliver it in the next release of MS SQL Server, codenamed Katmai," Clark writes. "These changes do mean that we are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release. 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."

WinFS's days as a stand-alone development effort are over. The decision had to have been made very recently, as the company had many WinFS-related sessions at its TechEd conference in Boston, and it's doubtful Microsoft would knowingly waste people's time that way.

It's also a dramatic turn-around from August 2005, when Microsoft surprised many people by unexpectedly releasing the first beta for WinFS during the Professional Developer Conference 2005 in Los Angeles. At the time, the fact that WinFS was progressing so well gave Windows watchers hope that the file system--which was slated to replace the aging FAT and NTFS file systems and provide a platform for a whole new generation of applications--would be ready soon after the delivery of Windows Server Longhorn. Now all those plans are up in the air.

While hitching WinFS to the SQL Server train and the killing of the beta 2 program seems to sound the death-knell for WinFS as a product, Clark says it could still make it into the Windows operating system. But there would seem to be a pretty big "if" associated with that.

"Since WinFS is no longer being delivered as a standalone software component, people will wonder what that means with respect to the Windows platform," Clark writes. "Just as Vista pushed forward on many aspects of the search and organize themes of the Longhorn WinFS effort, Windows will continue to adopt work as it's ready. We will continue working on the innovations, and as things mature they will find their way into the right product experiences--Windows and otherwise."

The move shows that Gartner's crystal ball is still working pretty well. The analyst group seriously downgraded Microsoft's strategy when it cut WinFS from Longhorn to make its ship date, and warned people to be suspicious of any products connected to it. As it turns out, Gartner deserves credit for not being swayed by the butterflies and for sticking to its hard-nosed skepticism.

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