Unify, Organize, Explore, and Innovate. Oh my! (Part 4)

…and then there was “Innovate”. We’ll close this series of posts by discussing how the WinFS relational platform provides powerful, next generation tools to the application developer.

WinFS is built on a true relational store that all applications can leverage. Today, tons of popular apps lock their data into proprietary stores. This includes photo apps like Photoshop album, music apps like WMP and iTunes, financial apps like Quicken and Money, email apps like Outlook, and so on. By using WinFS, developers can concentrate on building rich applications without worrying about creating a storage silo. After all, WinFS can give applications a place for all their structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

In addition, WinFS will provide services like synchronization, notifications, rules, and backup/restore. The services provided by WinFS lead to a zero-admin and extremely reliable experience.

All the data in the store is accessible as CLR objects, so developer can leverage all their Visual Studio and .NET knowledge while building apps. Developers can also utilize our full query engine over their data and transport their data with our robust serialization support. This is a significant improvement over today’s cumbersome interaction with multiple forms and multiple locations of data.

So we’ve covered Unify, Organize, Explore, and now Innovate. Hopefully you have a better understanding of where you can go once you combine a traditional file system and traditional database.

As always, please post any questions or comments.

Author: Vijay Bangaru