It isn't much of a surprise but apparently WinFS is
pretty much being scrapped. You can just read through all of the comments to see how I feel. It has been years since this was promised to us and I think it is one of the truly innovative things that MS could do to their OS. Maybe there will be some value out of them using what they have learned and applying it to SQL/ADO.Net but nothing nearly as revolutionary as an object-based file system.
I think Vista is going to be an overall improvement to XP but I really expected more from an OS that they have been working on for this long. I'm not sure what real value we are going to get other than UAC (and hopefully that works a little better in its final implementation). Honestly, what are we getting other than bells and whistles with Vista? I suppose DirectX 10 will force a lot of people to it. It appears that Vista has
better searching based on document properties (useful for indexing photos I suppose but there are tons of apps that do that already). I'd rather have a new OS where the only new features were UAC and WinFS than all of that other junk.
Here's another
good link on some of the things that WinFS could have delivered for us. Maybe it takes a company as innovative as Google to make something like this happen. I'm sure when they release their first OS in 2009 it will have some interesting ideas embedded in it. :)