WinFS postponed? (Sam Druker, I'm looking specifically at you! :)

Press release from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/Aug04/08-27Target2006PR.asp

WinFS will be introduced to Longhorn later, amongst the other jokes in there. Since the article is can't get more vague, it'd be nice if someone related to the WinFS team could clarify the reason for pushing it out of Longhorn RTM.

Having toyed with the alpha (build 4074), it seems to work quite OK, if you ignore half-functional explorer UI. Adding the remaining development time on top, I'm curious to know why it WON'T be on schedule.

Thanks for any infos. I hate WinFS being delayed.

I think the best news though is that WinFX, including Avalon, will be made available for XP and 2003 server too.

This is a very important thing since most ISV's won't write software that only works on Longhorn.  Now we can use WinFx and Avalon at will

--Oren

At will is relative. Enough people are already reluctant to install the .NET framework, now figure what they'd think if an application (especially shareware) says .NET Framework AND Avalon, totalling into a 100megs or so download.

IMO having Avalon on XP is meh. Good for development if you want to keep your development box as it is, but for the consumer, it's the opposite, especially since it'll likely be not hardware accelerated.

Clearly you've underestimated the scope of WinFS, or have never worked on a large scale project.  Microsoft cannot simply code up features at a whim because they have to deal with the long term repercussions of their actions.  Making a major change of plan (full server support with sycronization) will require a lot of planning,designing, coding, testing, debugging, etc.  You cant simply add a million people to a project like this to get it done faster.  If you did, then you would end up with what we seen in the Open Source community every day.  Forked projects, poorly designed projects, little documentation, only the fun stuff getting done, alpha projects being released to the masses, perpetual sub v1.0...I could go on.

If you hate that it wont be done on time, why dont you apply at Microsoft for the WinFS team and help out?

Thanks for asking, Tom. I've written some stuff over in the thread for Jim's video. I really can't say anything more about release dates. They pay me to build this stuff and build it right and then pay some other guys to do a great job at keeping track of it and figuring out how to balance the communication to our customers.

I'll back up Pseudo's comments, too: if you are a developer and thing you've got what it takes, get to microsoft.com/jobs and apply. There's a bunch of WinFS jobs posted there RIGHT NOW.

Samuel

Edit: JW's got the goods here, btw. This is spot on:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jmazner/archive/2004/08/29/222493.aspx