First thing to understand is that this is not a replacement file system in its current form. During the install it setup this as a seperate space and my hard drive format is still NTFS. This is a test of a file system structure and how it will work in the future. Being Beta 1 there are certain things that should just be understood by a common technical user.
The other thing I forgot to mention before is that I am doing this testing on my Dell Optiplex GX 270 running WinXP SP2 with 512MB and a 40GB drive.
The first thing that needs to be understood with this Beta, since it is not a replacement FS, is that this is a new structure for data to exist. It is a database and it has many chacteristics of that structure. Here is a picture of the WinFS Stores and the creation process for a new Store.
Notice that earlier I created a space called My Stuff. Below is a view of the data that I placed in My Stuff as a test:
There are several new things to notice in the above view. First is the path. It is \\MIKEB1\My Stuff. This is showing the name of my system and then the path to the location of my data.
Second is the left hand panel. In the panel on the left there is a Folder Tasks section. I clicked on the file Agenda - January 2005.doc and it gives me options to interact with that data file. If I open the file it acts exactly as it always has.
The third thing you should notice is the Type of file. For the file Agenda - January 2005.doc it is listed as a System.Storage.Documents.Document. You will notice that the image file scoble_mn_1.jpg is a System.Storage.Image.Photo file. The other files are listed as System.Storage.GenericFile. The files listed this way are EXE, MP3, ZIP, OPML and WM. Because this is Beta 1, I expect that this will change in the future.
Because the path is easy \\{System Name}\{folder name} it is easy to create shortcuts for quick access to the data. Here is an example of the shortcut:
I am going to continue to work on how this data structure will work. One of the things I am going to test are installing an application to that space.
If you are thinking about trying this Beta out, I would recommend it. This is a good way to start to understand the directory and file structures of the future.
I will post more updates on this in the future...
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