Last minute change

So, I made a last minute decision to attend a different session than I had planned. When I arrived at the room for Indigo Web Services Protocols and Architecture, there was a pretty big crowd of people waiting outside and the theatre there isn’t so big so I decided to try something else.

I went to the WinFS: File System and Storage Advances in Windows “Longhorn”: Overview presented by Quentin Clark. I was a little underwhelmed by the WinFS concept but this session filled me with enthusiasm. The data model is simple yet powerful, which in general suggests a really well thought out approach that appears more obvious than it actually is.

The combination of a relational model that also uses XML with an NTFS stream based file system is a difficult one to get your head around. I certainly can’t claim to have thought through many of the implications of this and, in fact, the session generated about a million new questions in my mind. It’ll be great to get Longhorn installed and give it a go.