Showing off the next release of WinFS at Tech Ed 2006, in Boston! Join us!

Hello!  Let me briefly introduce myself.  My name is Shan Sinha.  I am a program manager on the WinFS team, having joined the team approximately 8 months ago now.  It has been a fast ride from the day I got started and it is only accelerating.  I have the good fortune to spend my time working with partners, customers and developers to build out our early adopter ecosystem for Microsoft.  It’s one of most fun jobs anyone can have!  First off, I get to work with people like you, investigating new opportunities for innovative applications on WinFS and dealing with the challenges of delivering those ideas.  Second, I’m part of a team at Microsoft building THE most innovative technology our company is currently working on (or at least we think so :-)). 

Imagine a world where data storage and retrieval just work the way they should- no need to create clumsy mappings between objects, relational tables, and byte streams being stored in files.   We finally can realize a world that simplifies the persistence, manipulation and retrieval of data, giving us an opportunity to create unique new applications based on those new capabilities.  If you are reading this, it would appear that you believe in this vision too.  It could not be more exciting! 

Let me take a few minutes to tell you about Tech Ed, which is occurring the week of June 11th, this year.  Since we announced the availability of Beta 1 last September, we have been busy incorporating all of the feedback you gave to us and preparing Beta 2.  Well at Tech Ed, we will be demonstrating why we continue to be so excited about WinFS, showing off features from our Beta 2 release, which will be available later this year.  If you have the opportunity to attend Tech Ed, be sure to join us- it will be an exciting set of sessions! You will want to join us for 4 sessions:

WinFS & Integrated Storage Overview [DAT202]
Monday, 6/12 9:00AM – 10:00AM
Speakers: Quentin Clark, Product Unit Manager, and Shan Sinha, Program Manager
Target Audience : General, 200 level

Learn about Microsoft's vision for Integrated Data – a single platform for storing and accessing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.  See how WinFS, Microsoft's new relational filesystem for Windows, delivers on this promise. Get a glimpse of how the next generation of your applications will benefit from a relational file system.

Deploying WinFS : Bringing a Relational Store to Windows [DAT211]
Tuesday, 6/13 8:30AM – 9:45AM
Speaker: Sethu Kalavakur, Lead Program Manager
Target Audience : IT Managers and Administrators, 200 level

WinFS is the new relational file store for Windows. This session will describe WinFS in the windows ecosystem – supporting backward compatibility for existing applications, performance tradeoffs, easier management through features like Automated Recovery from Data Corruption, security semantics and more. You will walk away comfortably understanding how to deploy, use and maintain WinFS on Windows.

Building on WinFS : Developing a Great WinFS App from Scratch [DAT416]
Tuesday, 6/13 2:45PM – 4:00PM
Speaker: Roger Lueder, Software Development Engineer
Target Audience : Developers, 400 level

A deep dive into building WinFS applications.  This session will walk through the capabilities offered by the WinFS platform.  We will create a rich data oriented application from scratch, showing you some great examples of new scenarios you can enable in your applications.  You will leave the session with the knowledge you need to begin building your own data-oriented applications on WinFS.

Next Generation Data-Access in .NET Applications with ADO.NET vNext [DAT304]
Monday, 6/12 10:45AM – 12:00PM.  Repeated: Thursday 6/15 2:45PM – 4:00PM
Speaker: Pablo Castro,
Target Audience : Developers, 300 level

ADO.NET 1.0 presented a break-through in data-access technologies with explicit support for disconnected scenarios and a lightweight, high-performance provider model. In ADO.NET 2.0, the API was extended to enable more scenarios, to perform faster and scale better. In this session we're going to discuss what comes next. The future of ADO.NET has both evolutionary aspects and serious innovation in it; from language-integrated query to object services to mapping, ADO.NET will bring simplification and great expression power to the Microsoft data platform, enabling the construction of sophisticated business applications and tools with less effort and more functionality.   The WinFS API takes advantage of the capabilities we are building into ADO.Net vNext.

Have no doubt- WinFS will be the future of Windows data storage!  Those who choose to explore WinFS early will be in the best position to know how to utilize it to improve their development experiences and enhance their users’ lives.  I look forward to seeing you at the conference and meeting in person. 

In case you will not be able to attend Tech Ed this year, we will be posting content from the conference on our site at https://msdn.microsoft.com/data/winfs.  Keep checking for updates! 

Tech Ed 2006 Home : https://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/default.mspx

Author: Shan Sinha