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Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX

Posted by simoniker on from the antlers-mounted-on-wall dept.

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."

9 of 681 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's a goal? by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "As smart as Outlook"?

    They mean smart as in crippling attachment functionality so that it's impossible to open anything even if you know the source and it can't possibly be harmful, like a PDF?

    They mean smart as in built-in anti-competitive DRM designed to squeeze others out of the marketplace and stopping me doing what I want to do with my e-mail?

    They mean smart as in the Outlook Web Access Client which doesn't work probably in any browser other than MSIE and uses (as always) their non-standard DHTML object model?

    They mean smart as in so wonderfully secure that Napster script kiddie Fanning can reverse the password encryption with his new contact updater software?

    Yeah I can see that's real smart. Microsoft Smart (TM).

  2. Re:That's a goal? by Daemonik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I beg to differ. Many Outlook viri are embedded into HTML messages that require no user action to run.

  3. Re:.Net Obsolete? by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would wager some money on the fact that this new WinFX is basically .NET with new APIs and some kind of code signing technology with enforced DRM to finally kill Project Mono. It was only a matter of time before they pulled this kind of thing.

    After all, you didn't honestly think that they'd let that continue for much longer, did you? This way, when Longhorn debuts in 2006, and all the .NET apis have changed, and the .NET runtime no longer runs unsigned code, 4 years of work on Mono will be down the shithole.

  4. Re:That's a goal? by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They mean smart as in crippling attachment functionality so that it's impossible to open anything even if you know the source and it can't possibly be harmful, like a PDF?

    Sounds like a configuration issue on your end. I have no problems viewing PDFs, JPGs, or other non-harmful attachments. You can even tell Outlook to stop annoying you with the bogus "potentially harmful" message if you're sure about it.

    On the other hand, we recently discovered that our Exchange backend is configured to automatically delete certain attachments. We couldn't send an Access .mdb file via email -- even between corporate accounts.

    They mean smart as in the Outlook Web Access Client which doesn't work probably in any browser other than MSIE and uses (as always) their non-standard DHTML object model?

    I call BS -- I use Outlook Web Access with Firebird from home with absolutely no problems. It works differently than it does if you use IE, but it still works.

    There's plenty to bash MS for, and Outlook is a lovely example of overly complex, overly insecure software, but at least keep it to the facts.

  5. Re:That's a goal? by kfg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bass are relatively easy to catch. Trout hard.

    Why? As it turns out it's because Bass are pretty smart fish. They can make generalizations. This thing has certain aspects to it that edible things have. Let's see if it's good to eat.

    Who knew that such things as Red Devils, Rapalas and rubber worms would come along?

    Trout, on the other hand, are primitive and stupid. They rely on hardcoded pattern recognition to find food. If the available food doesn't match the pattern a trout can starve among plenty. Or ignore your fly.

    The problem with Outlook isn't that it's stupid. It's too smart. It makes decisions for the user ( who should, legitimately, be the sole source of intelligence when reading mail. Post your luser joke here).

    It's like a Bass. Too easy to catch virii and malicious code because it recognizes that it's something that might be able to run. Well hell, let's try to run it and see what happens.

    Gotcha!

    KFG

  6. Re:That's a goal? by jon3k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly. There's nothing you can do about stopping someone from emailing a virus. You can stop it at an email gateway of course, but nothings 100%. I accept that.

    What I don't accept is virus that are automatically executed simply by viewing an email in the preview pane. As soon as you click on it, you're infected.

    We've mostly got visual basic scripting to thank for that.

  7. Re:That's a goal? by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    in all fairness a large part of the virus-infection problem lies with the end user who clicks on every attachment they receive.

    And Outlook is to blame for this, because it LETS THEM.

    There is absolutely no reason to launch an executable file from an email attachment. If you attach a non-executable document file to an email, sure, let the application that filetype is associated with open it up from within Outlook, but any attempt to execute an EXE/COM/BAT/PIF/SCR file should result in 'not allowed.'

    User security policies are only as good as what the system allows the user to get away with. A system that tells you DON'T DO THIS but then lets you do it anyway is worthless.

  8. OSS has always been better, now Faster! by raw-sewage · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Has Microsoft published any kind of official or semi-official list of new features for Longhorn? If so, the open source community should look at that as a software requirements document. Here is the opportunity to show the world that, not only is open source often of higher quality than commercial software (at least Microsoft's), but now it's faster to market. Traditionally, open source is viewed as "playing catch-up" with commercial software (at least in the desktop arena). I think now is the time to release everything Longhorn will have.


    It looks like Microsoft is already playing catch-up with Linux in some respects. The "sidebar"? What about Windowmaker's dock apps? What about gkrellm? What about the various panel apps for Gnome and KDE? I haven't seen any details about the WinFS file system, but I'm betting that whatever Microsoft comes up with could easily be done with some combination of MySQL, OpenOffice.org's document architecture, a pretty GUI and some glue to hold it all together. (It's an obvious point, but in case anyone has forgotten, developers have choices choices choices with open source: the GUI could be motif, Tcl/Tk, GTK, Qt, OpenGL, ...; the "glue" for this could be PHP, Perl, Python, shell scripts, ...)


    In brief, unless Microsoft has a huge ace up their sleeve, whatever they want to do or come up with has already been done or can be done quite quickly with the enormous, comprehensive open source infrastructure that is available today.

  9. Re:But don't forget by jon3k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So lets go over this:

    1. User gets email.
    2. User clicks email to view it.
    3. User is infected with virus.

    Explain to me how its the users fault again? Maybe they should have been running some 3rd party antivirus software?

    Oh wait, if VBS scripts didn't have the inherent ability to automatically launch scripts, it would be a non-issue.

    Ok, that came off a little more condescending than I thought but the point stands: How in the *world* is that the users fault? Should they just not read email?