> Perhaps the open source community is currently working on something like PowerShell's PSDrives, but adoption by the teams producing large apps would be critic

> Perhaps the open source community is currently working on something like PowerShell's PSDrives, but adoption by the teams producing large apps would be critical to its success. plan 9 (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/). Virtually all of plan9's system services are exposed as filesystem servers (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html). Some of these may astonish you - a windowing system, a FTP client, an SSH server, an authentication agent... Overall, the system is much simpler than PSDrive - PSDrive providers are full-fledged .NET objects, plan9 FS are just directory structure plus text files. Yet they achieve roughly the same thing. (Actually plan 9 does more, but I believe in principle PSDrive can be used to do these as well.) Similar things (exposing system service as fs) is actually possible in Linux or BSD, with FUSE. You can actually wrap utilities and expose them as file servers, and there has been some limited success. But as long as upstream utilities are not adopting the FS as the primary API (which is unlikely), I don't think it's really going to take off.