Ritwik said:
I was reading about Vista today in PC World USA, and was shocked to learn that the first "projected release date" was in 2003
The release date has been slipping for 3 years now and yet MS is not including all the features that were promised initially, like WIN FS
God help us!
here's a short para on history of WinFS:
The development of WinFS is an extension to a feature which was initially planned in the early 1990s. Dubbed Object File System, it was supposed to be included as part of Cairo. OFS was supposed to have powerful data aggregation features. But the Cairo project was shelved, and with it OFS. However, later during the development of COM, a storage system, called Storage+, based on then-upcoming SQL Server 8.0, was planned, which was slated to offer similar aggregation features. This, too, never materialized, and a similar technology, Relational File System, was conceived to be launched with SQL Server 2000, but as SQL Server 2000 ended up being a minor upgrade to SQL Server 7.0, RFS was not implemented. But the concept was not scrapped. It just morphed into WinFS. WinFS was initially planned for inclusion in Windows Vista, and build 4051 of Windows Vista, then called "Longhorn", given to developers at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in 2003, included WinFS, but it suffered from significant performance issues. In August 2004, Microsoft announced that WinFS would not ship with Windows Vista; it would instead be available as a downloadable update after Vista's release.
On August 29, 2005, Microsoft quietly made Beta 1 of WinFS available to MSDN subscribers. It worked on Windows XP, and required the .NET Framework to run. It was refreshed on December 1, 2005 to be compatible with version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. WinFS Beta 2 is planned for some time later in 2006, and is supposed to include integration with Windows Desktop Search, so that search results include results from both regular files and WinFS stores. It is also supposed to make WinFS stores available via the ADO.NET API. A third Beta is scheduled. The final release is not likely to be available until late 2007. It is not clear at this time whether the final release of WinFS will be included with Windows Server "Longhorn" or not, but Microsoft has stated that WinFS will be included as a component of a future version of the WinFX developer framework.
I sometimes wish that I'd stuck to 98SE.
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In other words laymans.
