Microsoft may not be willing to talk file-system futures, but it is working to back-port its future file-system technology to Windows XP.

Microsoft is back-porting its WinFS file-system technology to Windows XP, the same way that it is doing with its Windows presentation and communications subsystems, according to company officials.

The acknowledgement is significant, given that Microsoft has been reticent to offer any details on WinFS since the company decided in August to cut the WinFS information storage and retrieval feature from both the client and server versions of Longhorn.

Longhorn client is set to ship in 2006; Longhorn server in 2007, according to Microsoft.

Company officials have declined repeatedly to project when or how Microsoft would deliver WinFS to developers and customers. Microsoft's silence had lead some industry watchers to speculate that WinFS would be relegated to the fate of "Cairo," the object file system that Microsoft touted throughout the 1990s but never managed to deliver.

A year ago, WinFS was slated to be one of the four main pillars of Longhorn. The other three, which are still set to be part of the next-gen Windows release, are the "Avalon" presentation subsystem; the "Indigo" communications subsystem; and the "Fundamentals" technologies that will improve Windows performance, security and reliability.

Microsoft decided to back-port both Avalon and Indigo to older versions of Windows — Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — in order to maintain backward compatibility and help seed the application-development market, officials said. But it made no such promises for WinFS, which resulted in many developer, customer and industry-watcher questions about WinFS' fate.

Read the rest at Microsoft-Watch

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Microsoft stopped short of confirming reports that it plans to back-port its next-generation WinFS file system architecture to Windows XP, telling BetaNews it is only evaluating the move while also acknowledging WinFS is still years off. "We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers," a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews. WinFS was originally slated to sit atop NTFS and track metadata for all files on a system to improve organizing, searching and sharing of information. Longhorn applications could also store data directly in WinFS, which is based on Microsoft's SQL Server technology.

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