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.'"

Comments

Inquiring minds want to know!

[AKAImBatman]

So the question on everyone's minds at this point is: What *will* Longhorn actually have in it? Avalon, Indigo, and WinFX are all being backported to XP/2003, WinFS has been dropped for the release, and now Monad (I love that name) is being cut. I'm not quite sure how Microsoft plans to sell the OS on such exciting features as "Better DRM!" and "We've got the security thing right this time. Promise!"

"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.

*Jaw hits the floor*

Five years? Whoa. Five years ago, Windows 2000 was brand new. Five years ago, Mac users were still stuck with OS 9. Five years ago, the tech boom was still on. Five years ago, Bill Clinton was still President. Even worse is that Win32 is only ten years old!

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. Confidence can be a good thing, but over-confidence can mean disaster. The bright side to this is that users will win when Microsoft is forced to go back to being an applications vendor instead of an OS vendor. Maybe they'll even get around to making another BASIC that doesn't suck. ;-)

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.

Re:Inquiring minds want to know!

[Ucklak]

XP was to Win2K what Win98 was to Win95.

I'm thinking WinME = Longhorn.

Re:Inquiring minds want to know!

[TCM]

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.

What will?

[udderly]

Maybe MS could just make it easier by letting us know what actually *will* make it into Longhorn...

Re:What will?

[One Louder]

My understanding is that Longhorn is no longer in Longhorn.

Re:What will?

[grolschie]

Longhorn will simply be Windows XP SP2 with a modified skin. All new actual features and enhancements have been canned. You will of course pay substantially for this new OS. ;-)

Split reality

[ProfaneBaby]

While the standard DOS shell is nearly useless, WMI is still pretty damn powerful. It has problems (most people in production lock it down, which will break a lot of the truly useful uses for it), but it makes this statement:

Microsoft Watch reports that 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.

Almost redundant. You can already write scripts with WMI that will let you do MOST of the things in Exchange that you would want to do from the command line, and once it's in the script, it's at least semi-permanent.

Even in UNIX, I tend to write scripts when there's more than 5 commands (even if the commands are all piped together into a single command) - I may know it well enough not to see it later, but my assistant tends to find the scripts very useful for his learning and library.

Chicken shits! I *knew* it!

[TripMaster Monkey]

Microsoft just doesn't have the Monads...

^_^

I for one,

[Spy der Mann]

welcome our new longhorn overl - what? Oh nevermind, they're not here yet.

Re:What will be will be...

[Skiron]

Maybe MS could just make it easier by letting us know what actually *will* make it into Longhorn...

The usual... trojans, worms, clippy...

1st thought: Good that it is comming...

[Spoing]

'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.'

2nd: The more time goes on, the more Windows takes on the features of unix.

3rd: Most every OS is some form of unix at this point except for Windows.

4th: Even Windows has a POSIX layer and unix-style command utilities for free as an add-on.

Wow...

[shadowmatter]

With all the features being removed, and the release date getting pushed farther and farther back, Longhorn will end up as nothing more than an expansion pack for Duke Nukem Forever!

- shadowmatter

Re:So...

[Tweak232]

The RSOD ;-)

I'm just waiting for this headline:

[alvinrod]

"Today Microsoft announced that it's new operation system, Longhorn, will not contain Longhorn."

What the hell is still in Longhorn?

What's next?

[__aaclcg7560]

The next thing that Microsoft will announce is that Longhorn won't run on the new Mac-Intel machines.

Re:Well..

[someguy456]

"which would enable users to do everything from the command line that can be done from the graphical interface"

I'll belive it when I see it

Sure, see it here, now

Re:Where

[TripMaster Monkey]

OK...here's a quote from the BetaNews article referenced in the summary:

Monad was slated to replace the command line in Windows with an object-oriented technology that rivals shells found on Unix systems. Beta versions of the software have been available to testers since early Longhorn alpha releases, but now Microsoft is looking further down the road with Monad.

You know, if you would just RTFA, things would be a lot clearer...

Five years... food for thought

[sterno]

Yup, five years. So what I'm lead to wonder is which we'll see first:

1) A good command line for Windows
2) A good GUI for Linux

I also have to wonder if Microsoft would be putting an ounce of effort into developing a command line if that wasn't something beneficial in Linux.

Enough already!

[freeweed]

Dude. It was funny the first time. Made me smile the second.

It's long since stopped being funny, and just makes stories on Slashdot annoying as hell to read as we scroll past your 8 pages of the same joke.

Remember, breveity is the essence of wit.

Let's try making a list!

[rbarreira]

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

Let me start with:

* RSOD (red screens of death)
* Dropping the prefix "My" from "My computer", "My network places", etc

Re:Let's try making a list!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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, .NET, and vector graphics.
* Indigo: a service-oriented messaging system to allow programs to interoperate as part of the .NET framework.
* WinFX: a new API replacing the current Win32 API (there's of course still Win32 + Win64)
* .NET framework 2.0 (the foundation for Longhorn)
* 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).

Why reinvent the wheel ?

[TractorBarry]

Ho hum...

In direct contrast to Apple (who had the sense to realise a good thing when they saw it by using *BSD as the basis of OSX) Microsofts new mission statement seems to be to prove the adage:

"Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."
--Henry Spencer

(apologies if the quote is attributed to the wrong person but I'm drunk and simply Googled for the first result...)

And I'm not saying humanity can't do better than *nix but, currently, it's still a hell of a good start (mind you I've worked on ICLs, now Fujitsus, VME which is simply a pure pleasure... a pure pleasure... File generations... Mmmm... recover that file from 10 edits ago before you made a complete balls up of everything...)