How to Be More Productive in the New World

In the post, which also includes a number of search-related screenshots from Vista, Allchin, who heads Windows development and plans to retire from Microsoft at the end of this month after some seventeen years with the software giant, is upbeat about Vista's built-in filter controls and the ability to change the view of the search results to icons of various styles.

But the most interesting part of the post for me is the three-line paragraph at the end about WinFS (Windows File System), and what it doesn't say!

Microsoft first started talking publicly about Vista, which was code-named Longhorn at the time, in 2003, promising that it would revolutionize information storage and retrieval; deliver vast improvements on the security front; and make huge strides in PC usability and reliability.

Then, in the summer of 2004, the company was forced to excise WinFS, which had until then been Vista's backbone, in order to meet its 2006 timetable. At that time, Microsoft said WinFS, the next-generation file system, would be made available as an add-on after Vista shipped.

Shortly after Microsoft's TechEd conference last year, where several sessions talked about WinFS and the upcoming second beta for the product, Redmond used a blog posting to announce that it was no longer pursuing the separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2.

All Corey Thomas, the group product manager for SQL Server, would say at the time was that the company was not going to comment on Windows direction or the road map post-Vista.

"Right now we are not talking about post-Vista plans for Windows and we are only saying that these technologies will be included in SQL Server and that we will not have the monolithic software component of WinFS in Beta 2 form. That does not preclude us from using these technologies in Windows going forward," he said.

In his latest blog post, Allchin doesn't say much about WinFS either, except that he believes Vista is actually enabling the end-user experiences that were first previewed at the Professional Developers Conference in 2003.

"While we originally envisioned the need for a new storage system (WinFS) in order to deliver on our search goals, we were able to deliver on our vision by simply enhancing our existing storage system," he says.

But to some software developers, like those at Base4 Solutions, the pulling of the WinFS add-on essentially meant that "we will have no relational file system in the forseeable future. Sure we will have ADO.NET Entities and SQL server will have more features, but at the end of the day there will be no relational file system," Base4 said in a blog posting on the matter.

"So has Microsoft given up on the relational file system? NO! But they have given up on integrating the relational file system with the Win32 API. I predict a lot of the WinFS ideas will slowly but surely make their way into the SharePoint roadmap," the posting said.

In a recent interview with me, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked about how the company would take longer to incubate some technologies rather than integrating them directly into products at an early stage, and cited storage as an example of this strategy.

"Take what we're doing with advancing storage. You know we're taking the WinFS and some of those principles and we'll have a release of SQL Server that includes those technologies. We can bring it to the file system and worry about the shell and changing all the applications in the second phase," he said.

So what's your take on the new search capabilities in Vista? How about on the future of WinFS? You can post a comment here or e-mail me.