Authoring File Systems with Mono on Linux

I know, this post isn't exactly Windows-related, but I thought it was cool nonetheless...

Miguel de Icaza recently posted on his blog on the topic of authoring file systems with Mono on Linux. Since I've been digging into File System "stuff" at work lately dealing with TxF and the like, I find this very intriguing.

With FUSE, you can essentially write user-level file systems that can be mounted in Linux. Not only that, Jon Pryor released a bridge for Mono that can be used to write file systems in Mono. Granted, I'd imagine there are some performance impacts and such that you may not want to do this in a production system (although I admit that my knowledge on the topic is NIL). It still seems like fun though. I know I have a couple of ideas that I've been batting around regarding developing my own file system driver for Windows. Perhaps I'll proof them out first on Linux and Mono in C# :).

Of course, all this makes me wonder what it would take to do this kind of thing on Windows. For those of you that may know better, is there a FUSE equivalent in the Windows arena? If there is, I wonder what it would take to create a bridge for that to enable writing mountable user-mode file systems on Windows. Hmmmmm. Maybe a post for a later date?