re: Tag! Metadata Made Easy in Vista

quux — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:54:16 GMT

ooh. A timely post. I was just looking for info on this, and here's something from an MS person ... and it is recent!

Chris, could you provide more info on when we'll be able to more fully *use* the metadata?

I notice that, the "comments" field only seems enabled for certain filetypes, like .doc. I found that it works on data that's out on shares, too.

But. On an XP system I found that I could add a comment to a .txt file - and that comment will NOT be visible when the same share is viewed from Vista. Just to be specific here, this also happens to be a Folder Redirection, and the shares are under DFS (there are two replicas, but I made sure that both the XP and Vista systems were looking at the same DFS replica).

I'd really, really, *really* like to be able to enter comments for all files, not just doc or txt. Just today I found that a certain .exe file would not run right on Vista (needs an older dll or something), and I wanted to make note of that. But I cannot.

Having the comments attribute viewable and editable for all filetypes would be the bee knees! What do you say?

Thanks for listening.

re: Tag! Metadata Made Easy in Vista

chris.chalmers — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:00:14 GMT

Thanks for the feedback! You're correct, Vista is merely surfacing attributes that were already present in the file: "rating" for .mp3, "author" for .docx, etc.

I agree that having a comments field viewable and editable for all filetypes would be the bees knees. Microsoft has been working on WinFS, I don't have insight into the current state of it, but there's background reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS and Microsoft's WinFS101 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480687.aspx