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Longhorn Promises Major Advances
Microsoft has great ambitions for the next version of Windows.
by Don Kiely

PDC, October 28, 2003

With no small amount of pomp and circumstance, Microsoft yesterday unveiled its early work on the next generation of computing infrastructure it intends to release over the next three years. Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, and Jim Allchin, Group Vice President of the Microsoft Platforms Group, presided over more than three hours of multimedia presentations before some 7,000 attendees during the first morning of the company's Professional Developers Conference under the smoky skies of fire-ravaged Los Angeles.

The keynotes focused on the Longhorn Experience, the yet-unnamed successor to Windows XP. You'll be seeing a lot of the Longhorn computing architecture over the next few months. The keynotes focused on three elements: presentation, data, and communication (see the related article, "Inside Longhorn") in addition to providing an introduction to the new Windows programming framework. If you thought that the current .NET Framework is the new Windows API that some have labeled it, be ready to be blown away. Microsoft is moving major new subsystems into the operating system and wrapping it into a .NET Framework-like programming interface. It is an extension of the COM+ strategy in which Windows includes enterprise component services. This saves the re-invention of basic infrastructure for every application you write, providing a well-tested and reliable set of application services and data store.

The new subsystems support an impressive UI and an array of related services, which Microsoft calls the most radical change since Windows 95. All of the presenters displayed the current version of the Longhorn desktop, though this is likely to change somewhat even before the first beta. It has a semi-transparent control panel on the right side of the desktop, with many hooks into running apps and data, date and time information, and other panels you can add for use with your programs. It puts the Windows XP quick-launch and task bars to shame, letting you preview data, open various views, and take other actions that will likely reduce how often you have to run a separate app to view or use data. You can display and preview any kind of multimedia content.

The integration of multimedia features begs the obvious question: Is the company setting itself up for more antitrust accusations for bundling features at the expense of competitors?

This is the first version of Windows that is really .NET-enabled. Windows Server 2003 bundles the framework with the OS, but Longhorn extends the model to provide a complete framework for programming Windows. Longhorn will ship with new namespaces that expose all of the OS's services with a consistent object-based API. The Win32 APIs—and their coming 64-bit descendants—will recede even further into Windows for direct use in only very specialized applications. In a couple of years, new Windows programmers may not even have to know that there is an ugly, mangled set of inconsistent functions on which Windows is built.

Note that Longhorn is built on the Win32 APIs as well as a new Win64 version, and it even has COM. But the new Longhorn namespaces feel like a natural extension of the .NET Framework. Or perhaps it's the other way around.

Getting the Fundamentals Right
Jim Allchin spent a fair amount of time discussing architectural fundamentals. A discussion of fundamentals seemed out of place in the context of the fancy code names and glitzy presentations employed throughout the morning. But Allchin emphasized that the company has been working hard to get the basic parts of Windows right, especially since this is the version that will fully implement Trustworthy Computing.

Microsoft has gotten a lot of feedback from the crash reports that Windows XP generates and sends to the company with the user's permission, using it both to improve Windows and to help developers create reliable applications. (Any software developer can request reports for their software at winqual.microsoft.com.) A few of the improvements he emphasized were improving system tracing to discover problems, fast reboot via non-volatile memory, active driver verification (no more of the lame "not approved for Windows XP" dialogs), and hardware monitoring. Deployment is going to get even better, implementing some of the innovations introduced with .NET and more, such as click-once deployment, software update services, and rapid migration. The crowd cheered when Allchin expressed his devotion to eliminating reboots when installing software. Maybe Microsoft gets it after all!

Given Microsoft's emphasis on Trustworthy Computing talk over the last couple of years, I was surprised by how lightly the subject was covered during the keynotes. But both Gates and Allchin acknowledged that the company has a serious responsibility to improve the security of their products and to better support privacy.

If Microsoft succeeds with even a portion of the ambitions expressed, Longhorn will be more secure and reliable by orders of magnitude over all previous versions of Windows.

About the Author
Don Kiely, MCSD, MCP, MDE, is a senior technology consultant. When he isn't writing software, he's writing about it, speaking about it at conferences, or training developers in it. Reach him at donkiely@computer.org.