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New MS Shell Will Not Be In Longhorn
sootman writes "Remember that new Windows shell? Looks like it'll be yet another technology that won't make it into Longhorn. 'It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver,' said Microsoft Senior Vice President Bob Muglia this week at Tech Ed 2005. However, it's not dead yet--despite not shipping in Longhorn in 2006 or Longhorn Server in 2007, the article says 'Exchange 12 administration functions will be built atop Monad, which would enable users to do everything from the command line that can be done from the graphical interface.'"
OK...here's a quote from the BetaNews article referenced in the summary:
You know, if you would just RTFA, things would be a lot clearer...
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The invite code is "mshPDC".
The Monad team is working on a new version as well and will have the new version available by the 21st of June.
Virtually every niche and cranny in Windows is getting some sort of makeover. Not everything is big enough to deserve new acronyms but the sum is much more important than its parts. The motto behind Longhorn is "make it just work" and so every function of Windows is being reexamined to make it fit in with that philosophy.
There are many internal improvements. Changes to caching and scheduling. Lots of things you will never see reported or expierence directly.
With MSH they want EVERY option you can set in the Windows UI to have a command-line equivalent. Which is a big undertaking.
So the question on everyone's minds at this point is: What *will* Longhorn actually have in it?
Did you try checking Microsoft.com for this information?
It takes some wading through marketing speak, but if you go through the trouble of checking out the info, you'll probably get a better figure of what's in it and not backported or delayed.
Here: About Windows Longhorn security, information management, Avalon/Indigo/Aero (yeah, parts of those are backported, but not all of these technologies).
If it takes Microsoft five years to get something out the door, I think they will soon find themselves becoming irrelevant in the desktop market.
Hmm, that could be debated since what you're talking about taking 5 years to get out is hardly something given a high priority for the desktop market you speak of, and probably why it's taking them 5 years as well. It's more for the server market. I don't even think Monad will ever be part of the Longhorn Client, just the server editions in a future. I'm actually surprised Microsoft is making a new shell at all -- I thought they were moving away from it.
On a slightly different topic, I really think that Microsoft is really on the wrong track with their combined Desktop/Server codebase bent. As technology marches on, Microsoft will quickly find that their competitors are taking advantage of technological solutions that only make sense on one side of the fence. I have to wonder if some of the delay that we're seeing isn't caused by Microsoft attempting to make all of their technology work in both arenas.
Well, Microsoft *is* going to "componentize" Longhorn much more than earlier versions. Not necessarily for the end users to customize their installs (although it might happen to as a result; I don't know), but for their own sake to easier be able to create Windows builds for the specific tasks they're aimed for. I thought even Windows Server 2003 showed significant progress here although there seemed to be some work to still do, yes.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Look at the Longhorn driver development page for insight as to what's going on:m spx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/WDK/default.
I'm glad you asked so I can finally get my money's worth out of a philosophy class I once took.
The name comes from the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. He had this idea that existence was made up of these atomic building blocks of experience. They link together and form all that we know about the world around us. These Monads make up the composite of possibilities that form our "best of all possible worlds."
But what is bash without /bin/*, /sbin/*, /usr/bin/*, /usr/sbin/* and so on? Just a nice frontend.
The main reason why a shell for Windows 1) takes insanely long to develop 2) will suck anyway is that the whole system beneath it is completely rotten, non-elegant and a pain to use.
Take the 'ipv6' command for example, if you installed the IPv6 stack on XP. They use dash options (-p), where most of the "DOS" tools use slash options (which AFAIK are the reason they have backslashes instead of slashes in paths). The notion of an 'interface' with that ipv6 command is completely awkward. Since their real identifiers are nicely hidden away below the shiny Network control panel, you have to use 'ipv6 if' to retrieve an integer that corresponds to the desired interface.
Examples of the current CLI sucking are:
1) a tab-complete in the middle of the line destroys the rest of the line
2) why does 'cd..' without a space even work?
3) as in 2), a 'cd...' or 'cd....' works as well in that it returns no error, it just doesn't do anything!
4) 'UNC' paths (\\server\path) are 'not supported' as the current directory. However, they are supported as args for commands (all commands?).
These are examples that lead me to believe that there actually is no structure below the surface of Windows and the tools it offers. I believe that Microsoft developers look at something and go implement it in a quick and dirty way, without ever having a bigger design goal in mind and without ever changing something once it has been hacked into place.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Bugger... I meant to add the URL where I found the quote as it's a good read...
Unix Utilities Part 4
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
People, let's try making a list of that which we do know that (for now at least) will be in Longhorn. Each person who replies just has to copy paste the previous list and add his content :P
.NET, and vector graphics. .NET framework. .NET framework 2.0 (the foundation for Longhorn)
Let me start with:
* RSOD (red screens of death)
* Dropping the prefix "My" from "My computer", "My network places", etc
I'll try my best:
* Avalon: a new user interface subsystem and API based on XML,
* Indigo: a service-oriented messaging system to allow programs to interoperate as part of the
* WinFX: a new API replacing the current Win32 API (there's of course still Win32 + Win64)
*
* WGF - Windows Graphic Foundations
* DirectX 10 which will further merge pixel and vertex shaders and introduce new technologies for 3D rendering.
* Lower user privileges (IE 7 will run in these on Longhorn)
* Included compiler (msbuild)
* New driver model and improved kernel/driver loading (drivers get "unloaded" in realtime if they become unstable) - also drivers get loaded quicker in the boot process so you can enjoy higher res/color depth while booting - also improved is boot speed and install time.
* New MS Installer
* New document format competitive to PDF
* An application deployment engine ("ClickOnce")
* Improvements in the ClearType font rendering technology + new system fonts
* New desktop search capabillities
* Improved security through lower privileged accounts and services
* Full support for the "NX" (No-Execute) feature of processors.
* New graphic user interface (Aero) using vector graphics for rendering.
That's everything I could come up and google within 10 minutes. Those are pretty much the biggest improvements that we know about. Then there are of course a lot of improvements on the device drivers, the way Windows handles drivers, wireless conectivity etc. The main code branch is built upon Windows Server 2003 SP1.
This is still 2 years away from release so I'm sure they can come up with more stuff. Hell, AFAIK Monad and WinFS will be available as free add-ons later on (SP probably).
Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance, Shadow Copy Service, WebDAV (Web Client) Support, Concurrent Console Users (Fast User Switching), Camera and scanning wizard, System Restore Points, Driver Rollback, Side by Side DLL support, Windows Firewall, DualView (ability to have the display on both the screen and a projector or TV), Synchronization Manager, Automatic Update (this was later added to Win2k), and a bunch of other stuff I can't think of right now.
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