36 Facts About WinFS

WinFS was the code name for a canceled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003 as an advanced storage subsystem for the Microsoft Windows operating system, designed for persistence and management of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

WinFS includes a relational database for storage of information, and allows any type of information to be stored in it, provided there is a well defined schema for the type.

Consequently, it would not allow development of a single application that can view or edit all data types; rather, what WinFS enables applications to do is understand the structure of all data and extract the information that they can use further.

When WinFS was introduced at the 2003 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft released a video presentation, named IWish, showing mockup interfaces that showed how applications would expose interfaces that take advantage of a unified type system.

WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the "Longhorn" wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows.

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WinFS aims to provide such a data model and the runtime infrastructure that can be used to store the data, as well as the relationships between data items according to the data model, doing so at a satisfactory level of performance.

WinFS natively recognizes different types of data, such as picture, e-mail, document, audio, video, calendar, contact, rather than just leaving them as raw unanalyzed bytestreams.

Besides that, WinFS allows different data instances to be related together; such as a document and a contact can be related by an Authored By relationship.

WinFS promotes sharing of data between applications by making the data types accessible to all applications, along with their schemas.

WinFS includes mappings for object and XML schemas by default.

WinFS automatically creates indexes on these tables, to enable fast access to the information.

Development of WinFS is an extension to a feature that was initially planned in the early 1990s.

WinFS was initially planned for inclusion in Windows Vista, and build 4051 of Windows Vista, then called by its codename "Longhorn", given to developers at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in 2003, included WinFS, but it suffered from significant performance issues.

Many of the principle features Microsoft intended to provide with WinFS included a pane for metadata property editing, breadcrumb-based property navigation, filtering or stacking items over properties, incremental search, and saved searches; these features were incorporated in Windows Vista.

Query composition, a feature of WinFS that allowed users to perform additional searches that reuse the results of a previous query, was later incorporated in Windows Vista.

WinFS uses a relational engine, which derives from SQL Server 2005, to provide the data-relations mechanism.

The WinFS runtime exposes services such as Synchronization and Rules that can be used to synchronize WinFS stores or perform certain actions on the occurrence of certain events.

WinFS provides unified storage, but stops short of defining the format that is to be stored in the data stores.

For example, a schema could be added to allow WinFS to understand how to read and thus be able to search and analyze, a PDF file.

WinFS stores are exposed as shell objects, akin to Virtual folders, which dynamically generate a list of all items present in the store and present them in a folder view.

WinFS needs to understand the type and structure of the data items, so that the information stored in the data item can be made available to any application that requests it.

For every type of data item that is to be stored in WinFS, a corresponding schema needs to be provided to define the type, structure and associations of the data.

Predefined WinFS schemas include schemas for documents, e-mail, appointments, tasks, media, audio, video, and includes system schemas that include configuration, programs, and other system-related data.

In WinFS, a Relationship is an instance of the base type Relationship, which is extended to signify a specialization of a relation.

WinFS provides three types of primitive relationships – Holding Relationship, Reference Relationship and Embedding Relationship.

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WinFS includes Rules, which are executed when a certain condition is met.

WinFS supports creating Rich Application Views by aggregating different data in a virtual table format.

WinFS uses the Windows authentication system to provide two data protection mechanisms.

Primary mode of data retrieval from a WinFS store is querying the WinFS store according to some criteria, which returns an enumerable set of items matching the criteria.

Each WinFS Item has two properties, named IncomingRelationships and OutgoingRelationships, which provide access to the set of relationship instances the item participates in.

WinFS API provides a class called the ItemContext class, which is bound to a WinFS store.

WinFS includes better support for handling data that changes frequently.

WinFS includes an Information Agent feature for the management, retrieval, and storage of end-user notification rules and preferences for changes to items in the data store.

WinFS API provides some support for sharing with non-WinFS applications.

WinFS uses Importer plug-ins to analyze the files as they were being imported to the store and create proper WinFS schemas and objects, and when taking the objects out, re-pack them into files.

However, since the WinFS project went dark, the status of this project is unknown.