WinFS Beta 1 Released (video soon to come to Channel 9)

Tom Rizzo of the WinFS team just posted that the WinFS beta 1 bits were just released. Channel 9 has a video that'll be up later today with an awesome demo.

It's the under-promise-over-deliver philosophy to win over customers. Well, it works! I love you, MS.

Yeah, I saw that. I wanted to post it to the front page, though, so needed to start a new thread.

Is the beta for MSDN subscribers only? Regardless, I'm looking forward to the video clip.

OOOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooOOOO!!!!

That's why you didn't want to put the video online ASAP.

--edit: MSDN only. I hate you, Microsoft.

Yes!  Does this mean, there is a chance it will be released with the client?

Their blog says beta release for Vista final.

Cool to see some news about WinFS, I will be satisfied if it supports WinXP SP2 and Server 2003 SP1 with the objectspaces persistence model. However not all  is clean, for instance:

• WinFS means Windows File System or Windows Future Storage?

• Is WinFS the final name or it will be rebranded Windows Storage Foundation or something similar?

This is really good progress for the WinFS and it definitely looks like it will actually make it into Vista RTM. Dang, they are even backporting it to XP and probably Server 2k3.

This is really good progress for the WinFS and it definitely looks like it will actually make it into Vista RTM. They are even backporting it to XP and probably Server 2k3.

Andre, read the blog Scoble linked.

This is awesome news!

I read the earlier threads on Channel9, quickly downloaded the 70odd meg WinFS Beta 1 and installed it on my XP machine (later installed in on the Vista partition as well).

I can see my WinFS share, but don't know what the heck it means and how to add files to it. I guess I better look at the help docs and the samples they have provided.

Can't wait for the demo .... Now would someone "release" another build for Vista and suprize us again!

- Keeron

Just ran across a post on the WinFS blog that is very intriquing... if this is true then I am very excited about the future of both WinFS and ADO.NET:

"Another piece of feedback was concerns over the WinFS api’s being a different data access pattern than our existing managed code data access APIs.  Further, that our APIs were not aligned with broader data platform needs like OR mapping.  This was a big one, and as you explore the SDK and the APIs, you will see the beginnings of how we will be addressing this.  We are in the process of building-out the next version of ADO.NET to have new features that provide a data model, object-relational mapping, and flexible query infrastructure.  The new data model is about entities, and the WinFS data model of Item types is built on that model.  Looking through our SDK and code samples you will see how Items are composed of underlying entities.  OR mapping is a big requirement - WinFS is a very prescribed mapping (defining a type in WinFS generates both the underlying storage schema and the partial class to program to that type)."

If they solve the OR Mapping problem for us, and we have a single API that works for both SQL Server and WinFS, that would be huge.

I take it the current "visual" performance problems when using the explorer is that the explorer plugin makeshift code, right? And oh, it seems to work fine on Win2k3, though it somehow doesn't want to promote my Office documents.

Tom Servo wrote:

Andre, read the blog Scoble linked.

Well, Rizzo is like the boss of the SQL Server team.

This is great news, looking forward to the video and will definititively be looking at this ASAP.

Seems like someone at MS has been working very, very hard to get this out.

A shame that the PDC sold out, It will be the most exciting ever.  I was finally granted permission and funding to go (when I checked the night before there it was not sold out), alas, it was not to be.

Way to go Microsoft. I am buying...