Microsoft Cuts WinFS from Longhorn to Make 2006 Ship Date

by Alex Woodie

Windows shops that were looking forward to the new Windows File System, which was supposed to debut in the next release of Windows, codenamed "Longhorn," will have to wait a while longer. Microsoft revealed last week that, to prevent additional delays and deliver Longhorn by 2006, it had to remove the new WinFS feature, which it said would appear in a subsequent release. Without WinFS, however, Longhorn won't hold much for server users.

Even as late as early August, the revolutionary WinFS file system, which will be based on relational database and XML technology and will replace the mix of FAT and NTFS in use in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, appeared to be on track. "The basic effort, the WinFS, Indigo, Avalon stuff, is coming along very well," said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, at the company's annual financial analyst meeting at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters only a few weeks ago. "We've made really good progress in the last year."

Microsoft collectively refers to "Avalon," the codename for the new presentation subsystem, and "Indigo," the new communication subsystem, as its WinFX system, and that will ship with Longhorn (in fact, Microsoft said last week that it will make WinFX available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 before Longhorn). While Gates may have said that WinFX and WinFS were coming along pretty well, apparently WinFS was not coming along as well as WinFX. So, instead of allowing WinFS to delay the entire Longhorn release, Microsoft decided to cut its losses and keep Longhorn on schedule to ship in 2006, which is when company officials have said they planned to ship it.

Microsoft bowed to pressure from its OEM partners to avoid another delay so it could have something new to sell besides Windows XP SP2, a free upgrade that Microsoft insists is not a new version (despite significant changes to security). "We've had to make some trade-offs to deliver the features that corporate customers, consumers, and OEMs are asking for, in a reasonable time frame," said Jim Allchin, group vice president of Microsoft's platforms group. "Our long-term vision for the Windows platform remains the same."

With WinFX, Longhorn will deliver new capabilities for desktop machines and developers. The new Avalon graphics subsystem will provide "breakthrough user experiences," Microsoft says. It will also enable three-dimensional graphics, which will tax the hardware and should please Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and the many suppliers of graphics accelerator chips and cards. Indigo, which Microsoft says will provide more secure, reliable, and transacted messaging and greater interoperability built on a Web services-oriented architecture, looks like it may hold more for corporate users than Avalon. But these aren't necessarily Longhorn features, as Microsoft plans to make these available to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users before Longhorn ships.

As of right now, Microsoft says it plans to ship the server version of Longhorn in 2007. Exactly how long that will be after Longhorn Client ships is unknown because of the vague launch dates Microsoft has for both the client and the server versions of the program. Longhorn Client could ship any time in 2006, but the time between the two might be short, for example, if Longhorn Client ships in the fall of 2006 and Longhorn Server ships in early 2007. This 2006 to 2007 timeframe was when Microsoft had expected to deliver the "Blackcomb" kicker to the "Whistler" Windows Server 2003. Longhorn was shoehorned in between Whistler and Blackcomb when security became a critical issue a few years ago, and Microsoft doesn't talk much anymore about Blackcomb, which was to be the first fully .NET-enabled version of Windows.

Microsoft says the new WinFS file system, which it keeps incorrectly calling a storage subsystem (which means a disk drive and a controller or a tape drive and a controller), will be in beta in 2006, when the client version of Longhorn is shipping. The chances look pretty slim that this would give Microsoft enough time to slip WinFS back into the server version of Longhorn, which won't be due to ship until sometime in the next year. Here's the official line from Microsoft on the matter: "Microsoft will deliver a Windows storage subsystem, codenamed 'WinFS,' after the 'Longhorn' release."

That seems to leave open the possibility that Microsoft will add yet another Windows release between Longhorn and Blackcomb. Alternatively, Microsoft could slip WinFS in as a service pack to Longhorn Server. After all, as we've seen with Windows XP SP2, Microsoft is not loathe to add considerable new functionality as a service pack outside the normal release cycle. Or maybe this is the new release cycle? It's tough to tell. But what we do know is that Longhorn Client and Server will launch without WinFS, and as far as server customers are concerned, Longhorn is for all practical purposes just another service pack.