The most interesting feature that was ever connected to what eventually became Vista was WinFS, a revolutionary (so it seemed, at least back then) new way of storing and accessing information on a computer.
This feature was cut despite actually reaching a closed alpha/technical preview release. There was a smoke and mirrors blog post from MS about the technology living on in an upcoming SQL server release, but to me it just felt like it was axed, hard.
Does anyone have any idea what happened to it? Is it killed, or just on the backburner? Was it just impossible to implement, too expensive, or did someone think of a better idea?
Are there any projects (From MS or anyone else) that have similar goals?
Best Answer
I don't think anyone really knows.
The most up to date information I can find is an interview with Quentin Clark in which he says that "most of WinFS either already has shipped, or will ship" just in other forms, such as part of SQL server or the ADO.net entity framework.
I personally suspect it was one of those projects that was poorly defined from the start. It was all things to all people and consequently could never fully realise all it's goals. It seems that all the research that went into the various different aspects of WinFS eventually grew into separate projects and became parts of other things.
You can see from this development timeline that it's been an ongoing project since 1990. that makes it one of the few software projects that actually been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever
[Edit: For completeness, here is some other info I found - WinFS Blog - Last updated June 2006. The last entry basically says WinFS was not dead but is no longer a separate product, it was planned to incorporate the tech into other products like SQL server and ado.net]
New information (May 2010):
I found this article which talks about the features of WinFS that have survived and live on in some form in Windows7.