Microsoft gives up on WinFS

WinFS was originally touted to be one of the pillars that Microsoft Vista was supposed to be built upon and was supposed to revolutionise the way users manage information.

The outfit later changed its mind on that one, promising that one day it would be seen as a Vista add-on.

According to Quentin Clark, a official Volish blogger, it seems that Microsoft seems to stick the vapourware on the never-never, at least as Vista is concerned.

You can tell he is setting people up for a fall when, on this as his bog here, he starts talking in the past tense about the great technical innovations that WinFS created.

"The most visible example of this today is the work we are now doing in the next version of ADO.NET for Orcas. The Entities features we are now building in ADO.NET started as things we were building for the WinFS API," Clarke ducks and dives.

The Vole has decided to that life is not going to be just about WinFS but make it more general purpose. This means shoving it into SQL and ADO.NET, and not delivering a separate WinFS offering, he bogs.

WinFS has been around since it was first touted as an add on to Windows NT upgrade in 1994. It was jettisoned when Vole couldn't get it to work. In those days it was considered that Microsoft's idea of getting file systems to run objects was a bit too ahead of its time. Vista will run a more traditional file system.

One of the reasons that Clark has to play down WinFS is that Microsoft made lots of promises that it would appear in the future. In 2003, Gates described it as the Holy Grail. Well they have a nasty habit of being tricky to find too.