The WinFS rumors were true: Microsoft has posted for download by its Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers a first beta of its next-generation WinFS file system.

While many developers were not expecting Microsoft to release a Beta 1 build of the technology until late 2006, Microsoft officials said on Monday that getting early bits to testers before Windows Vista (Longhorn) shipped was actually the plan of record since last year.

"Beta 1 is by no means early or late," said Quentin Clark, director of program management for WinFS. "And it will still be in beta by the time Vista ships."

Originally touted by Microsoft top brass as the crux of Longhorn/Vista, WinFS was set to be a platform for organizing, searching for and sharing all kinds of data and information. Microsoft described WinFS as a revolutionary storage platform that would include schemas for everything from images and documents, to people, tasks and events.

But in August 2004, Microsoft officials announced it was cutting WinFS from both Vista client and Longhorn Server in order to ship those products in a more timely manner. A first beta of WinFS was not anticipated to debut before Vista shipped in the latter half of 2006.

Following that bombshell, Microsoft executives refused to discuss WinFS. Until Monday, that is, when Microsoft made public some new information about WinFS and its plans for the technology.

Microsoft officials said Beta 1 runs on Windows XP with Service Pack (SP) 2 or "higher" releases. It does not run on Windows Server 2003, Vista Beta 1 or Longhorn Server Beta 1, according to Clark.

Going forward, Microsoft plans to release separate client and server WinFS beta and Community Technology Preview (CTP) releases, Clark added. A WinFS software-development kit (SDK) comes with Beta 1, he said, and should be part of future beta releases.

Microsoft plans to make WinFS Beta 1 available to attendees of the company's upcoming Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in mid-September. The WinFS bits will not be updated for the PDC, and thus, will still only work on Windows XP SP2 only, Clark said.

Clark said Microsoft still is not committing to a final ship date or delivery mechanism for WinFS. But it will not be part of Vista when it ships next year.

"We decided not to stay on the Vista timeline because we knew we'd need more betas," Clark reiterated.

There is no technology dependency between WinFS and other Vista or Longhorn Server subsystems, Clark said. But there are "strategy links" between WinFS and what Microsoft brass called, in the past, the other Vista/Longhorn pillars, such as Windows Communications Foundation (Indigo) and Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon).

There is also a strategy connection between WinFS and Windows Workflow Foundation, the workflow-automation subsystem that Microsoft is planning to build into future iterations of Windows, starting with Longhorn Server. Windows Workflow Foundation is the technology formerly known as WinOE (and later, Windows Workflow Services).

"With Workflow Services, you want to be able to build things like data notifications," Clark said, in explaining the connection between that subsystem and WinFS.

Clark also characterized as a "strategy conection" the link between Microsoft Business Framework (MBF) and WinFS. (When Microsoft cut WinFS from Longhorn, it also postponed MBF, which relied on WinFS.) Clark said he had no knowledge of the current MBF schedule nor that group's plans to take advantage of the WinFS beta builds.

Clark, like other Microsoft executives, noted that the search and indexing technology that will be part of Vista is based on the work of the WinFS team.

"We're continuing with the indexing technology that will be part of Vista. A lot of the work done there (in Vista) was work my team and the Windows Explorer teams did," he said. "WinFS will give you more of the context. It will provide an explorable relationship between two pieces of data."

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One Windows developer noted he was aware of Vista's limitations and still looking forward to WinFS.

"Originally the main benefit of WinFS was that you'd essentially deal with your files as an SQL database which gives a ton of flexibility in how you organize and manage data on your local, network, and Internet accessible machines," said the developer, who asked not to be named.

"That's still the main benefit in my mind," he continued, "but in Vista, they are making use of the NT File System's (NTFS's) streams — attaching keywords and such to the files — to make them much easier to index and find quickly. The limitation here is that it's not a database really, just a faster way to find files using the traditional search techniques. The other limitation is that it's local PC only, whereas WinFS has the potential to work across a network, if you're using a WinFS-based server."