Wondering if WinFS will make it into Vista? Well, aren't we all. Looks like you can at least get a taste of Microsoft's next-gen filesystem, because the first beta is available today over on MSDN. There's even a blog (gasp!) for WinFS... Looks like MS is making serious inroads to push this into Vista, and apparently this taste will even work on XP. Don't go putting it on your mom's machine now, OK?

A big part of the release is due to some pretty irate developers when MS discussed the data model back in 2003. See, MS really does listen! Major changes have happened to WinFS since then, and from what I can tell they're all for the better. At least, those developers should be much happier. There are still major overhauls to ADO.NET and some other components before all of this gets "done," but obviously MS is playing on one of it's core strengths here: backwards compatibility. Most of these changes are to introduce a fundamental shift is file storage whilst not breaking too much of what used to work in NTFS. So jump on in and give it a try, the only thing you have to lose is all your data...