Microsoft's 2003 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) reminded some observers of the same event in 1993, when the hot topics were the Win32 APIs, a rough draft of Windows 95 code-named Chicago, and a preview of a futuristic object-file-system-based NT successor code-named Cairo. The hot topics this year were the WinFX managed APIs, a rough draft of a future version of NT code-named Longhorn, and … Cairo. Now called WinFS, this vision of metadata-enriched storage and query-driven retrieval was, and is, compelling. Making it real wasn't then, and isn't now, simply a matter of engineering the right data structures and APIs. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]