WinFS hasn’t been cut from 'Longhorn'
Spinner
Birmingham, UK
It was previously reported that some of Longhorn's features were to be trimmed back in order push the next generation operating system by Microsoft into the Alpha build stages. Since that original report however it has been stated that some of the cut backs reported were slightly exaggerated. Jeremy Mazner, Longhorn Technical Evangelist, explains the Longhorn feature cut and what it will mean in reality.
Source: MSDNI found that the vast majority of the WinFX technology we showed at PDC is still on track.
WinFS hasn’t been cut. WinFS hasn’t even really been scoped back.
Are we still building an extensible synch architecture for bringing data from remote servers into WinFS? Yup.
Will we have a default synch adapter to help one WinFS machine talk to another? Yup.
What were Jay and MaryJo talking about when they said WinFS wouldn’t work over a network? I’m not entirely sure.
It’s possible that Jay had some confusing information about Longhorn Server – a product whose feature set, particularly around WinFS, has not been the subject of any public comments that I know of.
“well, is there anything that you did cut?” The answer is yes – features get cut all the time in a software product. But the scope of these cuts is so small that it’s barely worth mentioning. I really wish we’d just publish the whole darn list to stop the speculation, but since I can’t do that, let me be bold and mention at least a few by name.
One feature the WinFS team cut was around how granular you can make schema change units. Change units are a nice trick to avoid conflicts during item synchronization -- by default, the entire item is treated atomically and any change to any property on the item marks the whole item as changed. Nice feature – and it’s still shipping. What’s gone is the ability to divide complex properties (aka nested collections) into their own sub-units.
Another “feature” that’s been cut: it looks like one of the internal schemas, for natural language user interface, has been dropped. Again, if you were counting on this, let me know why.
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