Although you don't have to know about databases to use WinFS, databases are interesting. In the database world the term entity is pretty common, but it might be foreign to most OOP programmers. Will users understand objects of the type entity?

https://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/pillars/WinFS/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwinfs/html/winfs07142004.asp

Quite a few people seemed to like the article and gave it one of the highest ratings I have ever recieved on MSDN (8 out of 9 with 95 voters).

I am currently writing a new article with Thomas about querying WinFS. If there is anything you want to know about querying WinFS, or WinFS OPath, please let me know.

Wesner Moise's comments on WinFS namespaces. “WinFS creates a number of names spaces for each type of item it recognizes such as WinFS.Storage.Contacts, WinFS.Storage.Annotations, and so on. Each of these namespaces seem to have around two classes. “

Last time I looked System.Storage.Contacts had 43 types with hundreds of members in this one namespace.

The more interesting question, IMHO, is why is there an Interop namespace and a Store namespace for many of the WinFS namespaces?

The answer is:

The Interop namespaces were required until the version of Whidbey that WinFS uses supported Nullability for WinFS scalar types.Once this occurs MC++ and IJW are the way to go.

The Store namespace are for the store API and should generally be avoided unless you know what you are getting into.

Again “AS IS” and I am not the authority, just someone with an opinion.

WinFS defines a unique XML grammar for describing its schema. WinFS schemas are not equivalent to the widely accepted W3C standards body’s XML Schema (XSD).

There seem to be a few reasons for this that mostly mirror Dare's post:

1. XSD’s scalar type set is not easily mapped to the SQL and CLR scalar type set used in WinFS. For example:

A problem arises at the very beginning when you try to map the WinFS Boolean to the XSD boolean. A WinFS Boolean can be nullable, while a XSD boolean can only be true or false.

2. There are a number of XSD constructs which have no equivalent in WinFS, such as global element declarations.
3. There are a number of WinFS constructs which have no equivalent in XSD. WinFS relationships, for example, cannot be expressed in XSD.

Note that you can describe WinFS Schema using XSD and WinFS can store XML documents and fragments (as can SQL Server Yukon Beta1). It seems that you gain a grammar capable of expressing WinFS schema, but loose some tool support, since current tools only supports XSD.

I disappointingly could not abstract much above the standard relational database stuff that came out of the 70s with the competition between IBM's System R and Berkeley's Ingres. (Is Berkeley the best CS school in the world, or what?). All I could think of was Chris Date's explanation that a database is a computer based record keeping system.

OK here's my initial straw man list:

• Data identified by unique keys.
• Relationships expressed through matching keys.
• The ability to retrieve information based on mathematical set algebra-calc

There are somewhat implementaiton details that happen to be common amongst most RDBMS and might not be what I am really looking for though. So here is the big question, what makes a database a database and not just a data store? Don't worry, this is going somewhere (in my follow up posts).