How Microsoft Built, and Is Still Building, Windows 10

An anonymous reader writes with this Venturebeat story about how Windows 10 is different from previous versions because of the way it was designed, including 15 public preview builds, and how much work is still being done. Windows 10 for PCs arrived two weeks ago. Thankfully, we don't need to wait years to say this will be a Microsoft operating system release like no other. The most obvious clue is not the fact that Windows 10 was installed on more than 14 million devices in 24 hours, that you can get it for cheap or upgrade to it for free, nor even that it ships with a digital assistant and a proper browser. No, the big deal here is that Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built. For the next few years, we'll be getting not just Windows 10 updates and patches, but new improvments and features. This is possible because Microsoft built this version very differently from all its previous releases.

Comments

Did you get paid?`

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you got money for running this advertisement, Slashdot.

Re:Did you get paid?`

[Anonymous Coward]

idk, seems pretty relevant to me and not too much of an advertisement. Like it or not, Windows is the most important OS on the planet and the one most of us use in our day-to-day livelihood. This isn't the Linux Gazette, you know.

Re:Did you get paid?`

[Anonymous Coward]

Well no, it's called slashdot (/.) but you do know where that comes from right?

Well I do, but you might not - it was intended as a joke to make the site name hard to read out, i.e. h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org.

Free Microsoft advertisement...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 isn't "built very differently" from Windows 8. Microsoft has always had the attitude of "F' it, ship it, we'll fix it on the road." -- Now it's just a "service" so they can proudly say it. Gheesh...

How Microsoft Built ... Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

make; make install?

Even more pathetic than that

[drinkypoo]

FTFA:

One of the big reasons it was even technically possible to deliver so many builds is because of the changes the Windows 10 team made to the build upgrading process. To be clear, the core upgrade mechanism was not new. This is the same in-place upgrade technology that is already available in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 (ESD files have been enhanced, but theyâ(TM)re still largely the same).

I learned that there were multiple new components, though, including targeting, pool management, registration, the insider channel, and so on. The most important new part is that the Windows 10 team was (and is still) able to offer a specific group of people a given set of builds, letting them do an in-place upgrade when a new build became available.

That's right, it's a new feature that Microsoft is able to offer a specific group of people a given set of builds. You know, what all the Unix distributions we know have been able to do since time immemorial? You can even create your own builds. Just create a new repo and add it onto the end of the list, with newer versions of packages. Done! Microsoft physically couldn't do that until right now? That's pathetic, just like the rest of their package management functionality.

Re:Even more pathetic than that

[tk77]

And yet after all this time I still can't install/upgrade Windows directly to an external drive. I run it on a 2013 Mac Pro (yeah yeah Apple, trash can, whatever you want to get out of your system) on a ssd via thunderbolt. Every time I try to install or upgrade to the drive the windows installer insists that the volume won't be bootable and thus won't install. You have to perform the upgrade on the internal drive (which means for an upgrade, cloning the ssd back to the internal) then clone it to the external to boot. Which boots fine, by the way. Oh yeah, and if there are any other external drives plugged in, they have to be removed or the installer fails, which is annoying when the external drive is daisy-chained off another.

Linux can directly install/upgrade to any drive on any bus. As can OSX. Why can't Windows do this after all this time?

Re:Even more pathetic than that

[drinkypoo]

Really? Linux can do this?

Yes, any asshole can do it at home.

So here we have Mr. Linux and he can setup groups and all of a sudden the "freetard" ring gets one build and the "It's GNU/Linux damn it" ring gets a different build, and the "I still want to run the 2.3 kernel" ring gets an older build? No, Linux CAN'T do that.

Who told you that? Of course it can. I can do it right here at home without even needing a distribution to do it for me. I make my own packages, using the same tools the distribution maintainers use. I put them in a directory, or in a web-accessible directory on another host, and add one line to sources.list or one one-line file (maybe two lines, comments are good) to /etc/sources.list.d/ and bango, I get debian twiddled with my own packages.

It is ridiculous to claim that Linux can do this.

Unless, of course, you have any experience with Linux. Then you've probably done it yourself, and you know how easy it is to do.

You can do the same thing trivially with gentoo with overlays. You create your own tree, overlay it onto the official tree, and bango. You get whatever you put into your tree. I presume you can do the same with rpm-based distributions, but I hates them my precious, so I use something else.

If only you knew anything about Linux or Unix, you might have something useful to add here.

Re:The big news...

[istartedi]

This. Said before and will say again. MS is following the "let's kick our existing customers to the curb to pursue somebody else's business model" strategy.

When the whole Metro/8.0/Windows Store fiasco started, I said something like "If I wanted a Mac I'd already have one" and got modded into oblivion for it. It seems like Slashdot caught on though.