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Announcing VFS, the Virtual File System

December 29th, 2009

I’ve been working on a new project of mine for a while now, and opened the project at CodePlex: VFS, the Virtual File System, is basically an abstraction to arbitrary hierarchical resources, which can be handled like a file system.

VFS comes with a set of file system providers and clients (including Silverlight support), and allows you to easily write your own providers (e.g. to expose the contents of a ZIP file on a remote server). Additional offerings are flexible security (e.g. to access your Azure blobs via VFS in order to plug-in a custom authorization scheme), auditing and reliable file transfers.

VFS is currently in early Alpha, but I’m working full steam ahead. Comments and wish lists are appreciated! For a more detailed introduction and a few code snippets, visit the project home:
http://vfs.codeplex.com

 

vfs_provider_model


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  1. Rick Cardarelle
    January 2nd, 2010 at 01:40 | #1

    I have been working on something like this for a few weeks, months, now too. Mine is to interact with local file systems, zip archives, and a file catalog in the clouds. Primarily for synchronization and change detection. Can’t wait to see more.

  2. January 2nd, 2010 at 09:29 | #2

    Rick,
    I got a little sidetracked (working on segmented file download/upload component for .NET/Silverlight, which might make it into an independent library) but hope that I’ll release more very soon. Are you planning to open source your code as well? It sure would be interesting to compare the APIs 🙂

  3. jbland
    January 6th, 2010 at 08:35 | #3

    have you checked out spaceblock.codeplex.com ? its a utility, but the library has a vfs implementation for cloud storage.

  4. January 6th, 2010 at 09:19 | #4

    Thanks for the hint! I know spaceblock – writing a VFS wrapper around their API is definitely an option.

  5. January 8th, 2010 at 17:42 | #5

    This looks very promising! When do you think the source code will be released?

  6. January 8th, 2010 at 17:47 | #6

    Dustin,

    I’m working full steam ahead, but there’s a lot to do if you want to do it right. I’m currently fleshing out the locking subsystem (if you request a download transfer, it is ensured that the folder that contains the file cannot be deleted) and the segmented transfer management. Downloads look good so far, uploads come next. I hope that I can update the CodePlex bits within a few days but can’t tell whether I’ll make it this weekend.

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