Mon, Aug 29 2005 10:33 PM Erwyn van der Meer

WinFS Beta 1 hits the streets

Quite unexpectedly Beta 1 of WinFS has been released (not launched, but really released ;) on the MSDN Subscriber Downloads site.

According this blog post by Tom Rizzo, Microsoft has released Beta 1 this early to give people time to evaluate WinFS before the PDC. I am very curious how WinFS has progressed since October 2003. At that time it was a big memory hog.

This are the system requirements according to the release notes:

  • Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with SP2.
  • A 2.0 gigahertz (GHz) Intel Pentium 4, or AMD Athlon, or compatible processor is required. 3.2 GHz or higher is recommended.
  • 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher is recommended.
  • An NTFS file system partition with 700 MB of free space is required to install and run "WinFS" Beta 1.

WinFS Beta 1 requires Beta 2 of the .NET Framework to be installed. The SDK can cooperate with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005.

I seem to qualify and I like living on the edge with alphas and betas so I am going to install it on my main Windows XP partition. This installation has survived several alpha and beta installs, so if WinFS drives it over the edge, so be it.

Tell tale signs that a reinstall is due:

  • A couple of months ago my Windows logo + E key combination inexplicably stopped working. It should fire up a new Explorer window but is now a no-op. All the other Windows logo key combinations work fine and Google hasn't helped me.
  • The programs menu starts to fill up the entire screen and it takes about 10 seconds before it appears the first time I click Start | Programs.
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# First Look on WinFS Beta 1

Monday, August 29, 2005 3:19 PM by Erwyn van der Meer

Here's my first look on Beta 1 of WinFS. In this post I will focus on the infrastructure. I don't want to regurgitate the WinFS documentation which seems to be in good shape for a beta.

# re: WinFS Beta 1 hits the streets

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 12:18 AM by Dennis van der Stelt

Nice about the Win-E key! :)

For some reason, whenever I startup my computer, it opens an Internet Explorer window. I cannot figure out how to remove this.

Sometimes when doing some stuff, it appears again. Problem some combination of keys or so.

It's not in the startup menu, it's not in the registry under /run/ or /runonce/ or anything. Dunnow what it is.

But it's also the first time that I've had this setup for longer then a year. It's my main pc and also gaming rig! ;) I try to keep it clean as possible, although some things start to annoy me currently. As it's also time for a new large and fast HD, I think I'll install WinXP again on that drive.

# re: WinFS Beta 1 hits the streets

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 11:33 AM by Erwyn van der Meer

My main Windows XP installation has been up-and-running since November 17, 2003. This is certainly a record for me. I have not tried to keep it clean so it amazes me how few problems I have (albeit annoying ones). I am not much into gaming but have Half Life II and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (legally owned ;) installed. Both run quite smoothly if I manually shut down unneeded autostart items before playing.

# Visual Studio 2005 Installation Tidbits

Sunday, October 30, 2005 1:33 PM by Erwyn van der Meer

Today I installed Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 on my machine that had plenty of CTPs installed. In this post I describe the good and the bad of the installation process.