Longhorn Developers @ MSDN

ePIsOdEOnline writes "The official Microsoft Longhorn Developers website went live. Content is filled with information fresh from the PDC, and the host of secrecy swarming Microsoft and its next generation Operating System, Longhorn"

Comments

Nice..

[cK-Gunslinger]

That's a nice source of information there. I was especially interested in their description of WinFS.

Everything that is stored in the WinFS store is an item and each item has metadata properties that are described by a schema. Items that follow the schema are stored in the WinFS store as serialized .NET objects and are accessed through T-SQL views that give access to the items' properties.

Re:Nice..

[cK-Gunslinger]

Only if "nice" is an odd way of spelling "evil". Do you know how crap "everything is a database" really is?

Actually, *nice* was referring to the information on the site. And if you read the *nice* information, you see that the file system will *still* be NTFS and that only the "Documents and Settings" folder (equivalent of '/home') will have the DB tie-ins and meta-data. You avoid the "everything is a database" problems with system files, etc and gain the benefits of "tons of user data is indexed and searchable."

Re:Guys this is a total Win98SE

[rabtech]

1. WinFS was always running on top of NTFS. It will change things, because the new storage API in Longhorn makes WinFS a first-class entity and the preferred method of working with the filesystem.

2. Nearly all the bits, like Explorer, applets, property pages, etc are being rewritten to run on the CLR. This also means Microsoft has greatly expanded the capabilities of the class library, but much of the windows-specific functionality looks like it will go under the Microsoft.* namespace, making it easy to keep cross-platform if you wish.

3. Aero is the new window manager, which does away with 2D/3D for an integrated, vector graphics & 3D, all-new windowing system. The new Aero classes do not wrap Win32. It talks directly to the window manager. How many of the other classes no longer talk to Win32 and do their work directly remains to be seen.

4. The Longhorn kernel will be the base of the next version of Windows Server, including the focus on managed code as being THE new API. This is a huge shift - Microsoft is basically telling everyone "get ready to move away from Win32/Win64 - it is in legacy mode now."

Sidebar

[bonch]

For all you trolls bitching pointlessly about the sidebar (which is optional anyway), this is from the UI guidelines page. which nicely describes what the sidebar is for:

"The sidebar will be most useful to users with large monitors who will have the space available to keep the sidebar open all the time. Users with small monitors will usually keep the sidebar minimized. When the sidebar is minimized, all sidebar tiles will have an icon in the taskbar; clicking an icon lets the user access the related tile."

In other words, it's not a big deal, and it won't take up your space. I think it's silly to react this way about an optional sidebar, when probably at least 80% of you run gkrellm and whatever other sidebar apps exist for the Linux desktop environment. This is just Microsoft's XML-based version of that concept (now comes the "they're stealing ideas again" replies).

Kind of reminds me of when Red Hat dared change their desktop theme, and all the knee-jerk Slashdotters flamed them to hell for absolutely no reason. Then it turned out not to be a big deal after all.