Patent surprise

I was searching around in the US Patent Office database this evening to find my patent for consistency checking of a backup without restoring the backup, for a Twitter conversation I was having, when I discovered that another one I filed before leaving Microsoft was granted in late 2009.

The new one was part of the old WinFS system – it deals with doing consistency checks on partial user-defined complex data structures as they're being read from a streaming data source so that inconsistencies can be discovered as soon as possible. Unlike the backup one, I actually wrote the code to implement this one (although it never shipped when WinFS was canned).

You can read about the patent (if you have insomnia) here.

I always wondered if that patent was dropped on the floor – now I know I've got two software patents :-)

Cheers!

7 thoughts on “Patent surprise

  1. I’m still torn about WinFS… I think it would have had some awesome parts, but been pretty headache-prone at the same time.

  2. Indeed. It never could get itself sorted out. FILESTREAM was another technology that came out of it, some others that still might see the light of day.

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