The WinFS blog is now back up and contains several posts from the development team.

Today we are very excited to announce the release of WinFS Beta 1. As you probably know “WinFS” is the codename for the new relational file system for Windows that provides a data platform for desktop developers.

Our Beta 1 release is a preview of WinFS, Microsoft’s platform that allows developers and users to unify, organize, and explore data in ways they couldn’t before. WinFS is a critical piece of Microsoft’s integrated data initiative. (Integrated data initiative is a term used to refer to a group of technologies whose goal is to provide better integration for data, since much of user data is locked in individual application silos).

This release contains the core of the capabilities we’ll have at RTM. The WinFS data model allows the definition of rich data concepts like items and relationships. It also includes the object APIs that help developers program with this new data model, along with a set of core schemas that can be used to bootstrap development and to share data with other applications. WinFS Beta 1 provides the infrastructure for extending these schemas and building synchronization adaptors to get data in and out of WinFS. Also included is the beginning of the Windows Explorer support to allow WinFS items to appear.

Our Beta 1 runs on XPSP2. We are planning on releasing regular Betas and CTP releases. WinFS will be in Beta as Windows Vista ships. When WinFS RTMs, we will be available for download much like the .NET Framework is today.