Thats right, WinFS has just gone Beta 1 see the official
Shipping WinFS Beta 1 thread on the WinFS blog on MSDN.
From the looks if it, MS will be releasing WinFS as a beta component
with Vista when it RTM's and later the final release. Whats
interesting - and yet mind boggling - is that WinFS is (quite simply)
makes your entire filesystem a database and WinFS itself is an instance
of Sqlserver that accesses the data. This means that we can store not
just files, but make it easier to search and even stream content.
I have yet to mess with WinFS and understand how it truely works, but
you can learn more about WinFS (maybe some parts are out of date?) from
TomsHardware or from a developers perspective at
C# Corner.