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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."
"building apps that are as smart as Outlook."
I was hoping they'd shoot higher than that.
Hmmm. Not many people are purchasing Office '03, and they're not releasing their next OS until '06. Wonder if their cash reserve will sustain them for three years?
Ok, so they've taken over the bottom of the screen with their explorer bar, now they're taking over the righthand side to show off stock reports? A few more years of this, there won't be any room left on the screen for apps.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Mod Bill Gates up +1, ROTFLMAO!
"During Gates' address, a Microsoft staffer gave a demonstration of Longhorn, highlighting among other features the "sidebar," an area on the right side of the screen capable of dynamically displaying messaging lists, stock quotes, news feeds, times and pictures."
:-/
Can't you do that with kappdoc....???
I'd like to see some screenshots of this 'new interface'.
The article rambles on a lot, but doesn't actually tell you anything. And..well.. I've never really tried it, but is Outlook that amazing
Bored? http://www.dodgybloke.co.uk
These announcements are nothing more than vague future directions...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Yes, the FX comes from effects, I can buy that on a video card (going for video effects) but how does that tie in to an application framework?
So ".NET" hasn't even really hit the ground running yet, and already it's sucessor is being announced? Too bad the Osborne curse never seems to affect MS when they do the same things that Osborne did.
building apps that are easier to use than Outlook.
Apple has it right, they build incredibly intelligent apps, with a minimalistic approach to user interface that has only the options people want. The result is that the apps are very easy to use and they look pretty to boot.
Do yourself a favor, switch to Mac now, you won't regret it. You'll have a easy to use desktop system with strong UNIX underpinnings. Plus, three years between OS releases is a long enough time to significantly erode Microsofts market share.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
"We need your feedback. We need your involvement to get this right."
Go open-source !!
Considering that longhorn won't be out until 2005^h6^h7, this sounds like a last-ditch attempt to stem the tide of small enterprise businesses which are rapidly switching to linux. Unless MS can show off some new functionality that can help the bottom line, their days are numbered.
Hey, that scum in your septic tank does a pretty important job... don't start comparing it to outlook to it, that's just mean....
1. avoid viruses
2. avoid worms
3. as smart as outlook.
Pick any two as long as you don't pick 3.
Every time my Outlook crashes, it just starts itself right back up again! It starts itself up several times each day! All by itself!!!
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Slashdolt
Well Microsoft is making a big point saying that security is their top priority. The closest they came to anything security related was "addressing problems with viruses and worms." Hopefully it will be something more than a half-assed virus scanner. If it isn't halfway decent, people will blindly believe that it will be enough.
Let's hope Microsoft also does things we have been suggesting for who knows how long: firewall enabled by default, etc. Oh, and go through your OS and disable useless things such as Windows Messenger! Yes, it might hurt Microsoft's feelings if they read Slashdot for 5 minutes but who knows, they might actually get something useful out of it!
The goals of this OS seems pretty much the same as the last one. The productivity gains of having a "sidebar" are probably the same as the MSN website sidebar, which is kinda like having a billboard blinking outside your bedroom window all night : a distraction.
An XM-based FS is going to be a meta-data nightmare, with more churning than one thought possible. The pagefile size will need to be quite large to cache all that crap. But they'll use the extra-speedy Intels to compress is on the fly anyway.
Most of *any* speech recognition is going to be from research done on [cough] *nix machines of the past decade.
Revamping the graphics system is just what the DirectX doctor ordered: new APIs! Everything can be antialiased, from busy dancing icons to cursors to controls. yawn.
By keeping everyone busy adopting the new platform, form ignores function and we get the same stuff in a new box. I hope they keep pushing it out. Then again, we're talking about people who confuse an OS with their desktop images.
mug
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.
.NET apis have changed, and the .NET runtime no longer runs unsigned code, 4 years of work on Mono will be down the shithole.
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
"A demonstration of WinFS featured a method to "stack" documents by author in a window, with the heights of the stacks corresponding to the number of documents, as well as file views that showed snapshots of documents, rather than just file names."
... In addition to those snapshots posted of Longhorn over the weekend, isn't it a bit odd that Longhorn is essentially using the brushed metal look from OSX 10.3? The only difference being that MS made the grey a bit darker. Kudo's to the MS UI team.
And ten years before this, Apple patented Piles:
"Apple holds a patent on this one. Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.
To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open."
There was a leak earlier this year apparently and here is a review. Review here at http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_alpha .asp
I have a Cig, but do you have a light?
The magic 8-ball says: "Outlook not so good"
Bart: Wow, it does work!
...just my 2 gil.
Don't worry about it. Many people experience similar hallucinations on psychoactives. Take it easy and try not to get paranoid. A beer or two would help too.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I am not one of those people who go around professing the evilness of Microsoft. I did, however, come across this logo on news.com.com that does look pretty evil. I doubt that it is official or anything
Evil Logo
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Good heavens so .NET joins DDE, netDDE, OLE, and ActiveX on the buzz word scrape heap. .NET
Just when I was about to order DevStudio
QT does not sound so bad right now.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Did anyone else read that as "Microsoft Officially Shows Lowerhorn"?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
From the article,
.Net code, which is supposed to help prevent developer errors that can lead to unsecure applications, according to Microsoft."
"Everything that gets written for Windows will be
Everything I read in the article from this to the talk about the file system and how it allows "searching for an array of files...strewn across ever-larger hard drives" and creating all these "smart" programs that "automatically sniff out network connections," really makes me wonder how secure this OS is going to be. Am I the only one who reads this stuff and thinks that a security vulnerability at any point has the potential of corrupting an entire system or even LAN?
Having easy lines of communications between the OS, apps, files and networked resources is great, but who's doing the gatekeeping between all these resources to keep them secure? And how is it being done? Or is it just assumed that once something is "trusted" its trusted to do anything it wants?
Or am I just paranoid?
Well, the mono guys will keep working on their code and keeping up with API changes.
When the signing thing comes, that's were it'll get weird.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Wow, based on that, I'd put Longhorn up there with ebola in the "must have" category.
I don't know, but it works for me.
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.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
Breakfast served all day!
Yeah, M$ and their minions are rather silly and their marketing people tend to confuse things by giving slight variations on the same thing different names (OLE to COM to COM+ to .NET), but hey, whose marketing people don't?
I think our natural enemy isn't M$ marketing, but marketing in general. There's this programming language called Java and Scott's minions decided to call the Java 1.2 SDK Java 2. (Interesting that I'm certified as a Java 2 programmer and the most recent SDK is 1.4.2. Does this mean that I'm a time traveller?)
My point is that everybody ships products with confusing new names in order to generate the kind of hype incrementing a version number just can't. Microsoft may be better at it, but everybody does it. If the marketing department at your company doesn't infuriate you on a daily basis or occasionally make slightly false claims about your product line, they're not doing their jobs.
There is a line, however, where the normal murkiness of marketing spin becomes pure evil and that line is crossed most frequently by the minions of Larry Ellison. Anybody remember the "Unbreakable" campaign? Nothing is unbreakable. Not even the most hardcore Linux zealot wouldn't have the gall to say something like that.
Even Apache spins. I've read some Jakarta project overviews that read like a cross between page 5 of the Windows Getting Started booklet and The Celestine Prophecy.
The point of my rambling post is that even our employers or companies whose technology we actually like are guilty of the same marketing spin. It's part of the world we live in, kiddies. Some people use their marketing spin for good, some for evil. The moral of the story is that even though Microsoft marketing people are dirty liars, Oracle marketing people are filthy lice infested dirty liars.
I bid you all good health and a pleasant afternoon.
I know I'm going to get slammed -5 redundant, but there are just so many things wrong with that statement.
Unless you are an MS zealot, the Outlook program was among the worst examples of a computer program. It was slow to start. It did a few different tasks, and it did them marginally. It took forever to shut down. It hogged resources so the whole system bogged down. It was dreadful!
This part is a bit off-topic, but back when I still used Windows, I recall installing Office, and it was an imparative to custom install only Word, Excel, Access, and Power Point. The default office install was a sure fire way to suck the life out of any PC.
BTW: Did anyone notice that the new Explorer looks suspiciously like a Mozilla skin?
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,
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.
Outlook is the ULTIMATE application, it is a VIRTUAL OPERATING SYSTEM which is AUTOMATICALLY logged in as the administrator.
Sounds almost like Emacs, minus the admin rights.
These are all from the PDC build (#4051) of Longhorn:
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
Gallery 3
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Am I the only one who finds it frightening that MS is going to offer a beta of a service pack? (Notwithstanding all the arguments stating all MS software is in a perpetual state of beta, anyway. :) )
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Bill Gates just made the Adam Osborne mistake. He announced "WinFX", whatever that is, as the improvement to
Adam Osborne's company made an early personal computer. Adam announced a new model long before it was ready. Sales stopped because everyone wanted to wait for the new model. Adam's company went bankrupt.
It was amazing watching the bankrupting of the company on TV at the time. Osborne's company went from being one of the fastest growing to having insufficient money for operations in about two months.
It was a sobering lesson. Computer companies sometimes die extremely fast. Novell, WordPerfect, Corel, Fifth Generation Systems, and Central Point are examples. There are many others.
Microsoft has not been managed well. The company survives and profits because of having a virtual monopoly on operating systems and on office suite file formats. Think about it, suppose someone had a monopoly on water. That person could soon be much richer than Bill Gates.
For most businesses, the free Open Office is all they need. There are significant benefits to Open Office. It is much less quirky than Microsoft Office, for example. Most people are not very observant about the software they use, and they hardly notice the difference between Microsoft Word and the Open Office word processor.
Right now, many businesses use software that runs only under Microsoft Windows. However, there are many desktops that only need software that is already available for Linux. Those can benefit from the increased stability of Linux.
People don't care about the cost of Windows. The cost is only a few dollars of the cost of the computers they buy. The biggest issue against Microsoft is its adversarial behavior toward its customers. Using Linux means never having to say "My operating system company is partly my enemy."
Microsoft is on the way down. Most people don't realize that yet, however. Microsoft is one of the biggest management failures the world has ever seen. If the company could make a few changes in its behavior, it could stay profitable. However, it seems that abusiveness is more important to Microsoft than money.
Note that WinFX is someone else's trademark. WinFX is the most cracked and cheated program I have ever seen. There are 50 times as many links to cheats as there are to the product!
Microsoft has scheduled an MSDN TV program about "WinFX" for November 6 (Subject to change by Microsoft, of course.)
Microsoft claims that WinFX is their trademark. (The link is to a Google conversion of a
Microsoft has a history of picking inappropriate trademarks. "X" means unknown. It was inappropriate to use the letter X in conjunction with "Xbox" and "ActiveX". Aside from being someone else's trademark, WinFX sounds too trivial for use with an extensive programming product. Traditionally, "FX" has been used to signify "effects".
I had piles long before apple patented them!
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http://cheeser.blog-city.com
1) Managed directX has, at worst, a 10% performance penalty against the exact same C++ code. People are always complaining about how we have an excess of performance in todays' CPUs. This seems like a good use of it to me, thanks to #2:
2) Managed code does not have buffer overflows. How many bugs in Windows and Linux, especially rootable bugs, are a result of a buffer overflow? 50%? 75% 90%? I don't know, but it is a lot. Dotnet code has zero buffer overflows.
3) Managed code avoids DLL hell: the GAC and side-by-side execution ensure that programs will continue to run on versions of libraries that they are designed to support, since minor/major version upgraded files will not be fed to these applications (although revisions still can for bug fixing reasons.) Neither the user nor developer need to even THINK about these issues - the runtime simply takes care of them.
4) Managed code upgrades to 64-bit in a neutral and architecture-independent way. Apps that are "bit neutral" will run on a 32-bit system JIT'd for 32-bit mode, and those same EXACT EXE files will run in 64-bit mode on a 64-bit system, including making use of new registers and other such things. No recompiles - the JIT takes care of it. This also means that much of the code Microsoft writes - mountains of it - to handle all kinds of things from Office to [insert favorite feature here] can be transported across 32/64 bits and architectures. No more Mac version of Office if they want - Abstract any platform-specific calls into one or two classes and have everything else be managed bit-neutral code. Notice that no one is being silly enough to suggest write-once-run-anywhere for useful apps; that is and always was a pipe dream.
I would not doubt that the dotnet runtime on Longhorn is not going to call the Win32 API much; They might just be doing it internally and only using the Executive (NT/2K/XP's kernel native API) when necessary. That would explain part of the time length. Not only do you have to upgrade your existing code to C#/VB.NET/Managed C++/whatever other dotnet language, but you need to rewrite the new runtime to completely rid it of any dependance on the Win32 API. In this way, you also make the runtime a little bit more platform neutral, vs having to convert it from Win32 to Win64 for other platforms. But this is just a guess.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
can be found at http://weblogs.asp.net/. It's an aggregate of .NET developer blogs, many of whom are at the PDC. Lots of pictures, reviews of speaches/demos/presentations/etc. Worth checking out, I prefer the reviews from in the trenches, like this one or this one, rather than the standard Yahoo/Reuters/media crap.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
"building apps that are as smart as Outlook.
Too.....many.....jokes!
For all the work MS is putting into this OS, there is not much that is new and worth upgrading for, even now! The only smart feature I can see is the XML database for files (do I really need stock quotes on my screen, taking up even more room?) Toss in a similar feature in Linux (and some disk encryption layer would be nice for mobile users) and you can beat MS to the punch. Noting the Linux development timeline, if they started now, they would still have it out 2 years ahead of MS.
> Bill Gates just made the Adam Osborne mistake. He
> announced "WinFX", whatever that is, as the improvement
> to
> WinFX, and Microsoft will lose the profits it would have
> had from those who wait.
But unlike Osbourne MS has LOTs and LOTs of cash and
other sources of income.
What longhorn is right now is Freezeware. They are
going to keep hyping it for the next two years. The goal
is to keep people who are on the fence about switching
from doing so. "Look!" (they'll say), "Linux doesn't
have any of these nifty features that are going to
make you so much more productive! (Please ignore the
Mac just to your right, thak you)."
IBM used to do it. MS learned the lesson. Remember the
build up to win 95? NT4? 2000? etc... the hype started
years before anything was released. IIRC win2k was supposed
to have the db based filsystem too. But at some point in 99
they just dropped that feature from the list.
http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
will be pronounced "Win Fix". Alternate pronunciations: "reformat hard disk", "install Linux"
Microsoft usually releases a patch about 3 months before the viri shows up.
I agree that these flaws should have never been their but I think much of the blame falls on the users.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Anyway. Why are they adding yet another desktop bar? It wastes space, it looks ugly, and it's difficult to remove. If they're going to add yet *another* taskbar to the OS, please allow it to be turned off!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Sorry. I was writing my Slashdot comment while I was supposed to be working, and I was a little too abbreviated.
At one time, Novell had 85% of the networking market. Now the company is still profitable, but much, much smaller. Part of the reason for the shrinkage was due to Novell's terrible abusiveness toward the consultants that supported its software. (In my opinion, it was terrible, that is. I still feel bad about the way I was treated.)
Actually, I have been hearing that Novell users are quite happy with its products at present.
If I remember correctly, Novell bought Word Perfect Corporation for $1,150,000,000 (yes, that's more than a billion dollars) and sold it 9 months later to Corel for $850,000,000 less. That is the most expensive single business decision I can remember.
> Novell is dead? Thats news to me!
Yes, Novell is dead. But they were above that magic size for a corporation where you never truly die, you just become an undead dinosaur. But while feeding off of an ever shrinking installed base can keep the lights on for a few years, dead is still dead. When was the last time you heard of a NEW Netware install? And if there will never be a NEW Netware customer, and a few abandon it every year, the end result is forgone. Just like there are still sites using Token Ring or DECNet, it doesn't mean that they aren't both dead technology. Dead in this sense doesn't mean Chapter 11, it just means zero growth, an end to innovation (i.e. maintaince only mode) and a long slow slide to oblivion.
Novell isn't porting to Linux to spur a new wave of sales, they are doing it because hardware is changing faster than they can afford to port Netware to it and the days of every hardware vendor undertaking the driver development effort for Netware are long gone. So they think that by putting a Netware protocol stack atop Linux they can keep selling their captive audience of legacy Netware installations a couple more rounds of upgrades.
Democrat delenda est
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.
And in other news, the band NOFX has doubled their sales on the iTunes music store today among Mac enthusiasts.
Ok, sorry, it was funnier in my head five minutes ago.
Sound waves should be free!