Quite interesting how many of the people commenting on this don't seem to have a clue what WinFS really is; it is not a desktop search engine (like Google Desktop and Spotlight are).

I have personally started writing "Data Haven's" on one or two occasions and the sheer amount of effort required made me abandon the projects. To be able to cross reference a file (eg a game walkthrough) into a folder for games and another one for walkthroughs sounds bloody brilliant to me. Over the years I've developed a system to keep my files organised and I can generally find where I've put my files, however I know of many ppl (my girlfriend for starters) who seem to have to either do a search on their own harddrives or sit there going over every bloody file cos they can't remember the file name. Everyone complains that MS didn't do it frst or they didn't do it the best, but as a cohesive whole their operating system is the best on the market. They also throw good parties.

People have problems finding files, because they use explorer. I never ever had problems, and i was always using total commander (windows commander in the past).
Windows still don't have symbolical links like in linux....

ooh, lookie, Unix's locate feature :P

I'll never figure out what is so hard about keeping up with your files. It's pretty simple; documents go in the documents folder, music goes in the music folder, etc.

:D
Subfolder for this year, subfolder for last year. Its simple really.

After reading all these infantile 'comments" or should I say "whinings" about MS, seems most missed the point here, its all about beta release of WinFS nothing else! This is not a 'whining' station for all whiners I hope!!!
Comeon guys, a bit more testosterone here.

"Also, for everyone out there there's a good video talking about WinFS on Channel9:
http://channel9.msdn.com...post.aspx?postid=106356 " That video is very discriptive as to what Win FS is. Many of the comments bellow show a respons e to the article and not all of the information available on Win FS. Before you go making post's complaining about it you should take some more time to learn about it. Watch the video and see for yourself. It's more than what you think and it's not going to be a totally noticable change if you don't want it to be. Spend at least 10 min. watching it and even more if you want to get a better idea. Win FS is a rather facinating thing.

A lot of people seem concerned about the removal of the "hiercharchical file system", meaning "c:\Folder\Folder\File.ext". That's not going away, unless they have changed anything from when I last saw it. MS is not the type of company that introduces something new without letting you use the legacy version for at least several years. Heck, we can still format XP as FAT if we want. No, the file system will still be traditional, but the main GUI will abstract away from that and use the SQL APIs to find and "store" stuff. There will probably still be a C: drive under My Drives or something. This is a paradigm s*** and a big one at that. Also, its not just about files, its about data. The data of your life is your's, not a program's. Your contacts shouldn't be "owned" by Outlook or GAIM or whatever, they should be available to all programs on your machine(s). The goal of this paradigm s*** is to change the way we think about our data. (And yes, this does open a whole can of worms as far as viruses, but that's for MS to work out.)

I understand that, but I don't like it. I want stuff to be tucked away in a program's special place(as long as it's not "My Documents", or "Documents And Settings\Admin\...").

Ideally for me, every program would have its own folder and subfolders for storing stuff, and all programs of a category would be built with import options.

I suppose if they do the viewer right it would be tollerable...I just hope they stick the data in a place most people can actually find(unlikely).

Is it any support for Adobe XMP / IPTC ? Will metadata be stored in the database or in the file

All that will still be stored in the file for years to come, it will be up to the application developer to decide what is stored in the "database" and what is stored in the binary. And possibly (and this is off of demos I saw last year) data might be in both places. When you update the file, you update the datebase (your choice thought). And before anyone groans about space, we're talking about metadata. Windows asks for several GBs just for recovery data, backup data, uninstaller data, I don't think you'll lose too much to metadata.

As usual, Microsoft is releasing a product well before the bugs are worked out of it. Remember Windows 98 (first version) crashing on live TV while it was being demonstrated?

Hello, this is "Beta 1". And as the article said: "WinFS will still be in beta when Windows Vista ships in late 2006..."

The Win98 incident was indeed a giant blooper, although it's irrelevant with regards to this article. But do remember that many other software were also bugware when they were first released. Firefox, for example.

"As usual, Microsoft is releasing a product well before the bugs are worked out of it. Remember Windows 98 (first version) crashing on live TV while it was being demonstrated?"

Yeah, I remember that. It was actually really funny.

The Windows 98 incident occured many years ago and some people still feel the need to bring it up even though it is completely irrelevant. Everybody knows Windows 98 is worlds apart from Windows XP. XP is everything Windows 98 wasn't and more. It just doesn't make sense to dig this issue up from the past when talking about XP or Vista.

"WinFS Beta 1" keyword - Beta

Heh...I didn't actually know that. That's funny. :D

Are we reading the same article? I somehow missed anything mentioning a release date for WinFS.......

It's a Beta, or did you miss that bit of news?

hm...they're releasing a BETA...you do understand what beta means right?

Funny how you bring up an issue that happened almost 7 years ago.

lol you could bring up dirt on any company if you go back 10 years on them.

According to one of my best friends (he was #1 hacker on campus, I was #3), it was a hardware problem. Looked that way to me also. Quite an irony.

Haha. It sound so confusing... I really want to know if Microsoft know what they want to release... Sound like: "We need to develop a new file system to see if we can catch Apple spotlight, as soon as posible (many years later)". I see, not a sea but a ocean of incompetents, and they still rule the market... Wow!

Well, why don't you just save us all and develop software. You truly sound like an intelligent person that would get things right the first time. Like Apple?(ha ha)

Remember, WinFS was publicly known about long before Spotlight. Most Mac users like to think that MS copied them, and I'll grant that some aspects of the UI could be considered copied. But you'd be amazed at how many things the Mac copied from MS.

I know a few things Apple grabbed from M$, but at least, Apple do it right. I mean, an idea is taken ok, bur they they improve it. I never saw that from Microsoft.I can name 10 projects in the last 10 years and the resulsts are always the same: Microsoft win market share, with a inferior, late product. What I still don't understand completly is how they do it.
Is bizarre to implement a new file system only to index files, and hide the true tree structure to the user... and with a slow process. You already have google desktop TODAY that works pretty good if not faster than Apple spotlight for PC.
Why to rush into ANOTHER file system to do something it's already done... More complicated, maybe slower (the M$ style) and (only my point of view) useless...
Wake up Microsoft! Make the software simpler, better. Look at google (just look at it, don't destroy them, please), they are doing things right!

Whether they improved it or not is a battle everyone can fight forever and not win. Both sides think they did better and the other side mucked it up.

As to the Google analogy, that's exactly the problem. People (and when I say people I mean your average user, mehums if you will) want to go to BestBuy/Dell, buy a computer, take it home, plug it in and be done. They don't bring a Microwave home and immediately install add-ons (although you and I would probably love to) and they don't want to do that with their computer, either. You can throw the favorite argument that I see here all the time of "in order to have a computer you should have to pass a test" but at the end of the day, we all use computers and we all need them. Search has become so instrumental to our daily lives that it only makes sense for MS to include it at the core of the OS. You can still use Google's Desktop search to your hearts desire, that won't break. This is for your average user who doesn't know what they're missing.

Also, for everyone out there there's a good video talking about WinFS on Channel9:
http://channel9.msdn.com...post.aspx?postid=106356

It sounds like it's going to get harder and harder to manage your own files. I don't want to have to do a search every time I look for something. It's where it is cause i put it there. What happens if you try to open a file that is the wrong file type? How do you find it? It scares me, I tell you.

I agree with that. Once the OS fails, how hard will it be to hook up the HDD to another system and search for files. I like the "My Documents" concept.

I don't think I like the sound of a 'sea of data'.

It's encouraging to hear MS is committed to bring this technology to market, though I'd argue that Apple perhaps applied a little pressure with Spotlight. Not to say that Apple invented the idea (I recall MS originally planned an "in memory database" for Windows 2000), but, once again, it looks like Apple was left to prove a concept for users first...

Apple in no way shape or form proved this concept first. Operating systems like BeOS did it years before Apple even had a proof of concept for it.

Does anyone recall 'Cairo' specs, well, db like file system was one of the big ones, also you should recall OS/2, apple didn't came first with this idea, AFAIK

frankly I like the traditional hirearchical file system. It makes it easy to keep things organized. The idea of everything being in a jumbled mess that you have to sift through with a search tool makes me rather nervous. What if you downloaded a video file that had the wrong extension, and was misidentified by WinFS as something other than a video file? Who knows where the heck it might decide to store it. It might not show up in a search of "video files". It might get lost in the "sea of data". When I store something, I want to know exactly where it is, even if I have to get at it *outside* of windows if need be. A place for everything, and everything in it's place as the old saying goes. Lets hope MS really knows what they are doing by completely changing a basic file organization system that has worked rather well for many years.

Yes, I totally agree with that. That's one of the main reasons I don't have a mac - it doesn't respond quick enough, and lacks some basic features I want(but has others that slow me down).

Examples would be the right-click menu. I can custom tailor it to anything I want in windows. Don't like Send To? Fine, use a few registry tweaks, and it's gone. Or you can add your own context menus to do whatever - or add a "Search" option to the start menu to search using your own homebrew program(which, btw, searches a hundred times faster than window's crap one).

If I wanted to do these things with a mac, I'd have a massive learning curve, if it's even possible. This is why I'm happy WinFS isn't mandatory atm. Not "having" to upgrade means I can keep my immense 4% folders, 96% files heirarchy that allows me to find any file I saved or program I want to launch in 6 to 10 seconds.

Edit: Upon re-reading this, I realized that came off very arrogent sounding.

Enter the Ostrich, head in the sand; Personally I look forward to trying this new piece of software.

I remember when IMS was the hierarchical store for data, painfully difficult to manipulate, when DB2 can out boy did things get to be fun...

I doubt anyone will have to search for a file all the time - windows will do that for you and you will be able to look at it however you want, C: will still be C: etc. MS will have to provide a hierarchical viewer just for backwards compatabiity anyway - the user needs to change "gradually".

It is also interesting how many people "blame the tool" - if I download something with extension xyz and it should have been abc...so whose fault is that - shouldn't you have named it abc when doing the download?

WinFS I am sure will be as good or as bad as the user who uses it; if you can't be bothered to correct the file names when downloading don't blame winFS blame yourself. Besides if this is an issue I am sure WinFS will be able to find the most recent files on your system quicker than using todays laughable attempt at "Search & Find"

Excellent news downloading already...

regards

>> WinFS I am sure will be as good or as bad as the user who uses it; if you can't be bothered to correct the file names when downloading don't blame winFS blame yourself.

Admirable, and I agree, but that's not exactly aiming things user friendly to the computer novice.(which is what they're heading for kinda)

Funny, I agree with the other guy... I find a hierarchical structure very easy to use and extremely flexible in how I can store things. Then again, I'm a very logical, organized person who actually pays attention to details and to what I am doing. I don't go around tossing stuff anywhere after naming it some cryptic jumble of nonsense that no one could remember.

So I suppose WinFS is good for all the people who can't organize their lives, their files, etc etc on their own and need someone/something else to do it for them.

Ok, how is the "Sea of Data" going to differintiate between different versions of files... like DLLs. Ideally you would have the most recent version in use only and it would be backward compatable, but that doesn't always happen and sometimes programs patch a DLL in a way that breaks other programs. I miss my Amiga more and more when I think of this... I also would like to see a way to load a DLL into shared memory instead of forcing each program to load a copy of it's own, thus boosting efficiency, but that's not really a WinFS issue is it? :)