I am a .NET developer by trade (but use a Mac at home and my Intel boxes run Linux).

In response to the idea that WinFS is going to get it’s indexing power from a custom SQL engine, I have to say that SQL Server on our XP boxes isn’t reliable enough to use an an integral part of the file system. IT JUST IS NOT! Consider how many implementations of home and small business users won’t have the benefit of IT support staff. Sure there are implementations of SQL on XP that are stable and blah blah blah, but we deal with SQL crashing in dev or even production environments regularly. Sometimes it is just restarting SQL that does the trick, sometimes it halts the whole server.

Point is I don’t want something as critical as my OS file system relying on SQL to tell me if my files should be backed up or not…one bad worm and bad news for everyone!