WinFS Not In Longhorn Server

KingFish

Microsoft is pushing back its deadlines again. Microsoft announced on Friday that the file system will now not be in Windows Longhorn Server, which is slated for release in 2007.

This means that though a test version of WinFS will may still be available in late 2006, Microsoft does not expect it to ship with any Longhorn OS. There is even speculation that it will not be available with the first Longhorn update, which is scheduled for 2008 or 2009.

Source: GEEK.com

Straight_Man

Corrrect, to keep the client versions able to meet the new schedule, they had to drop the complete-meta-file WinFS from Longhorn clients. Therefore, it has been dropped from server also, for better client compatibility amongst other things.

After all the security patch work they had to do and are still having to do-- and that sidetracked how many folks they could dedicate to Longhorn dev-- MS had to pull in its horns some as far as the next gen of Windows goes. They are talking 2008-9 for WinFS right now, possibly as a service pack, though that would be a lot to architect into a VERY BIG and complex Service Pack. There is also the "existing software" problem, if they institute full WinFS folks will need to upgrade lots of things to versions that UTILIZE it and are compatiible with it. Not a lot of folks are deving software for WinFS compatibility after the client support for it was pulled as a spec. Some dev houses in fact were starting to dev based on initial WinFS specs, and are not really happy to have wasted dev funds on that.

Shivian

Serves em right... they should have learned that lesson when Longhorn became delayed the first half-dozen times.

I'm curious how a file-system (considering the resources M$ has available) is so hard to develop and debug. Admittantly it is crucial that there aren't bugs. Hope this isn't an indication of the effort required to truely debug M$ code like existing OS's and browsers