Microsoft News Tracker

(Via Neowin) Neosmart has the details:

Microsoft has just released a new build of Windows Vista for technical beta testers. Windows Vista Build 5456 offers many security, functionality, and performance advantages over the previous build (Beta 2 - build 5384.4). Vista Build 5456 is quite a large leap number-wise, and according to Microsoft, in features and performance as well.

Some of the new features include a revamped Aero/DWM subsystem, and a completely overhauled and significantly less obtrusive UAP for all those that couldn’t stand the previous one. From what we have been told by Microsoft, the Time Zone bug that plagued all most all previous builds of Windows Vista has been patched, and quite a few fixes in the Regional Settings and IME have been patched.

Paul Thurrott on Friday had the big picture:

Give Microsoft some credit: Though Windows Vista has been delayed innumerable times and has suffered through some horrific growing pains, the company just keeps plugging away. And now that the lackluster Beta 2 release is out the door, Microsoft intends to ship monthly builds to testers in the form of Community Technical Preview builds, the first of which should appear any day now (they’re in the 54xx build number range). Meanwhile, consumers who signed up for the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program (CPP) and installed and activated Vista Beta 2 will be eligible to receive the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) version of Vista when it ships in, oh, say, August. The idea here is to put these pre-release versions of the product in front of as many eyeballs as possible during the time period where Microsoft is doing performance and fit-and-finish work. Hey, it can only get better.

Unfortunately, better is a relative term.

Update: Paul Thurrott has kicked the tires on build 5456 and says it really is better:

But what we get in build 5456 is dramatic improvement in reliability, usability, performance, and fit and finish. It is, quite simply, the build Microsoft should have shipped as Beta 2 to millions of people around the world. This build is so much better than Beta 2, in fact, that I’m begging the company to offer it to everyone that signed up for the public beta through the Community Public Preview (CPP).

With the announcement of Bill Gates’ planned departure, there was speculation as to the fate of some his pet projects including the perpetually elusive WinFS (”Windows Future Storage”) file system. Well, the other shoe has dropped and WinFS is no more per Quentin Clark’s post on the WinFS team blog (which is also what you get when you head over to Microsoft’s official WinFS Web page):

It’s these storage innovations that have matured to the point where we are ready to start working on including them in our broader database product. We are choosing now to take the unstructured data support and auto-admin work and deliver it in the next release of MS SQL Server, codenamed Katmai. This really is a big deal – productizing these innovations into the mainline data products makes a big contribution toward the Data Platform Vision we have been talking about. Doing this also gives us the right data platform for further innovations.

These changes do mean that we are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release. With most of our effort now working towards productizing mature aspects of the WinFS project into SQL and ADO.NET, we do not need to deliver a separate WinFS offering.
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Since WinFS is no longer being delivered as a standalone software component, people will wonder what that means with respect to the Windows platform. Just as Vista pushed forward on many aspects of the search and organize themes of the Longhorn WinFS effort, Windows will continue to adopt work as it’s ready. We will continue working the innovations, and as things mature they will find their way into the right product experiences Windows and otherwise.

If you’re having a hard time parsing this, refer to Robert McLaws:

Ok, well what he actually said was they broke up the project across different products, and some day they’ll go into Windows, etc.
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Hey, I chug the Kool-Aid from a freakin beer bong here, but even I have to say that Microsoft’s putting a PR spin on this albatross that probably isn’t going to fly. “it’s not dead… it lives on in productized form in Katmai!” Yeah, and Bob lived on to become Clippy.

Read McLaws’ whole post, because his major point is that WinFS was supposed to be a relational file system, not these two ancillary features. Touting the fact that you found these features in WinFS and are slapping them on SQL Server is rather like picking through a fast food dumpster and marveling that you found 2 French fries (my analogy, not his).

Of course, aside from the years of WinFS disappointment, it’s also had a pernicious effect on other Microsoft products. Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo:

So that’s it, no more WinFS. This is the right decision, albeit two years too late but better late than never. It’s sad to think about the projects that got killed or disrupted because of WinFS only for this to happen.

The poster child for such a project has to be Windows Vista which had to drop WinFS in the famous Vista “reset” of 2004, despite it being one of the three original Vista technology “pillars.”

Update 6/26: More from Dare Obasanjo here.

Update 6/28: Quentin Clark has an revised announcement here.