Its been quiet on the WinFS front since Microsoft delivered a refreshed version of its beta code in December—until this week.
On May 16, the WinFS team whetted the appetites of advocates of Microsofts next-generation file system by sharing information on plans for a new, Microsoft-developed application for WinFS, code-named “Project Orange.”
The team posted hints about Project Orange, which they described as “the killer app for getting users organized,” on the WinFS team blog.
They described Project Orange as “a new application for people to organize their information—entirely built on the new storage platform (WinFS) and new (Windows) presentation platform (WPF, aka Avalon).”
Originally touted by Microsoft top brass as the crux of Longhorn/Vista, WinFS was set to be a platform for organizing, searching for and sharing all kinds of data and information.
Microsoft described WinFS as a revolutionary storage platform that would include schemas for everything from images and documents, to people, tasks and events.
But in August 2004, Microsoft officials announced the company was cutting WinFS from both Vista client and Longhorn Server in order to ship those products in a more timely manner.
Microsoft distributed a first beta of WinFS in August 2005— months earlier than many were expecting. In December, the team released a Beta 1 refresh to testers.