Today Ed Botthas been furiously rubbing the lamp hoping that the great genie Sinofskywill appear and grant him some wishes. Well, since there's a chance that Microsoft is listening, here's my wishlist.
Now for stuff that I'd like to see but will not appear in Windows 7 for certain ...
Ideas?
[UPDATE: Ed Bott asks 'Why would you want WinFS?' Here's the TalkBack reply I posted:
I'll give you one reason right off the top of my head why I like WinFS ...
... and no, I've never said or hinted in any way that this was a replacement for NTFS.
The aspect of WinFS I liked was the ability to create schemas that could be used to teach the system different file formats not already understood by the system. So, for example, a schema could be produced to allow indexing of, say, BlogJet files or a directory listing of say 7z files or an ISO file. This would have allowed third parties to extend the quality of search results beyond the limits placed upon it by Microsoft. I'm not currently aware of any system whereby Windows Search can be augmented.
WinFS also, at least on paper, promised a far more organic search experience that didn't rely on keywords of knowing what file extensions you were dealing with.
Another reason that WinFS was promising was that it was more open than what we currently have. The situation as we have it now is that Google Desktop Search beats Windows Search in both speed of indexing, processing speed and the quality of results on every system that I've tried it on. Unfortunately it doesn't work on 64-bit (or at least I've not tried it as the download claims to be 32-bit only).]