Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX

Theaetetus writes "Microsoft today unveiled its most detailed look yet at its new OS, Longhorn, due in 2006, during Bill Gates' keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. An article at Internet Week describes some of the goals: avoiding viruses, worms, and 'building apps that are as smart as Outlook.'" The company "also unveiled 'WinFX,' which it described as a new application programming model for Windows that is the evolution of its .NET programming framework."

Comments

Win32 dog

[GreatDave]

The WinFX announcement confirms something that I had suspected for quite a while, and that is that .NET was meant to be a replacement for the Win32 API. Win32 is the "familiar" application framework for Windows, but as many have noted (and most Win32 developers know), it is a complicated, cumbersome beast. Give me a choice between Win32 and raw Xlib and I'd take Xlib, thank you very much (but Win32 is a full blown C API with windowing functions just one of many facets, so don't read into this comparison too much.)

Anyway, Win32 is implemented as one of many subsystems on NT and all its successor operating systems. .NET, and now WinFX, are/will be implemented in the same way, as just another set of APIs. But this is significant, because Microsoft hasn't done this just for kicks. I believe they are on the way to offing Win32. Why?

1) It's 32-bit, and the IA32/x86 market has its days numbered now. Honestly, not many of us need 64-bit computing, but at some point, killer apps will appear. As we all know, Microsoft's preferred method of forcing an OS "upgrade" down people's throats is bundling it with hardware. Aha.

2) It's not portable. This ties into the first point, but why might Microsoft be interested in portability? I don't just mean hardware, I'm talking about OS portability. Microsoft wants a contingency in case Windows (NT/2000/XP/2003/Longhorn...) finds itself becoming a legacy system (I think it already is, but that's just my opinion.) Maybe it's finally dawned on Microsoft that a VMS-based kernel with heavy process invocation fees isn't going to be able to win benchmarks while Linux keeps getting faster and better. Microsoft is only winning server benchmarks by virtue of building their SMB/CIFS and HTTP daemons into the kernel, you know. Who cares about stability? Benchmarks sell software to IT-ignorant PHBs.

3) Win32 is messy, and most Windows C(++) programmers avoid using Win32 directly at all costs (that's what MFC and ATL are for). Microsoft likes DRM, and DRM requires kernel/subsystem-level API calls. Likewise DirectX, which Microsoft is truly investing in; they know multimedia is their strong point and that the enterprise server market is something they can never corner. SMEs running VB apps using MS SQL, maybe, but not Fortune 500. So, they want a framework that is as "open" and "powerful" as Microsoft believes it can be, without opening up the source, of course.

So... whew. There you go.

Re:That's a goal?

[Sylver Dragon]

1. Tool - Options - Security - Zone
2. Change this to "Restricted Sites"
3. Zone Settings - OK
4. Disable everything
Outlook is now sanitized for your protection!

Now why this isn't the default, well that's something we can blame on MS, but its not unavoidable. Oh and, just because I haven't done it before (and if I don't someone will):

5. ?
6. Profit!