It's been quiet on the WinFS front since Microsoft delivered a refreshed version of its beta code in December – until this week.

On May 16, the WinFS team whetted the appetites of advocates of Microsoft's next-generation file system by sharing information on plans for a new, Microsoft-developed application for WinFS, code-named "Project Orange."

The team posted hints about Project Orange, which they described as "the killer app for getting users organized," on the WinFS team blog. They described Project Orange as "a new application for people to organize their information - entirely build on the new storage platform (WinFS) and new (Windows) presentation platform (WPF, a k a Avalon)."

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.

Microsoft distributed a first beta of WinFS in August 2005 – months earlier than many were expecting. In December, the team released a Beta 1 refresh to testers.

Testers are expecting a Beta 2 build of WinFS this summer. Testers said they are expecting WinFS Beta 2 some time between Microsoft's next beta refresh of Longhorn Server -- which could arrive as early as next week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) – and the company's Tech Ed conference, slated for mid-June.

According to unsubstantiated information on the WinFS Wikipedia page, Microsoft's goal was to release a Beta 2 build on May 1 that would "include integration with Windows Desktop Search." A third beta is slated for November 2006, with a final release due in late 2007, the Wikipedia page said.

According to the last information Microsoft shared publicly about WinFS, the current plan is to ship the product some time after Longhorn Server ships, which is currently slated for the latter half of 2007.

When asked for an update on WinFS, a company spokeswoman provided the following statement: "Microsoft isn't ready to talk publicly about Project Orange beyond what is in the (WinFS team) blog post. Timeframe for the WinFS beta 2 release is this summer of 2006."

Microsoft has posted a half-dozen job ads for openings on the Project Orange team. One recruitment listing, for a user-interface program manager, reads:

"Do you want to help users finally get organized? Are you tired of working on standard usability challenges and excited by the chance to work on a whole new user paradigm for information management? Think that you have an eye for the 'killer app' for a new platform?

"Project Orange is a brand new team tasked with building a next-generation Information Explorer based on WinFS and WPF (AKA Avalon) to help users finally get organized. This is a soup-to-nuts project focused on defining a breakthrough user experience for users to unify, organize, and explore their data in meaningful new ways. WinFS and WPF offer dramatic new opportunities for information management by merging the traditional world of relational databases with end user data and offering new opportunities for interaction & visualization," the ad continues.

The WinFS team also points to a Microsoft-designed concept video which Microsoft first showed at the 2005 Professional Developers Conference, called the "WinFS iWish" video, that highlights some of the theoretical kinds of applications that could be built atop WinFS. Project Orange is an amalgamation of some of the ideas presented in that video, according to the WinFS team members.

The video demonstrates how a WinFS user could plan a party more quickly and simply if all his/her data, including annotations, documents, calendar entries, photos, contacts and projects, were drawing on a single, unified data store.

"It's not just about search anymore," the iWish video says. "It's about the relationships of your data."

The video ends with the tag line: "WinFS: The power of a relational file system."

The idea of Microsoft building a concept application designed to show off the power of its system-level software is not new. The company developed a photo-sharing application code-named "Max," that is meant to demonstrate the power of the Windows Presentation Foundation and Vista platforms. The company also is building a music-production application, code-named "Monaco," that also is meant to be a Vista showcase application, according to sources.