The Development of Longhorn

In 2000, Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, announced that the successor to the forthcoming Whistler operating systemlater renamed as Windows XPwould be a new OS codenamed Blackcomb. A year later, however, just a few months before the release of XP, Microsoft announced a change of plans: Blackcomb would come much later than expected, and between XP and Blackcomb, probably around 2003, we'd see a minor update codenamed Longhorn.

Note

Microsoft has long applied codenames to prerelease versions of its products. For Windows, the practice began with Windows 3.1, which used the codename Janus. The first of these temporary monikers that was in any way "famous" (that is, known reasonably widely outside of Microsoft) was Chicago, the codename for Windows 95. Since then, we've seen, among many others, Memphis for Windows 98, Cairo for Windows NT 4.0, Millennium for Windows Me, and Whistler for Windows XP.

So why the codename Longhorn? Legend has it that Bill Gates has fond feelings for British Columbia's Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort (the name of which has given us two codenames for Windows, so it's clear that someone at Microsoft loves the place). At the base of Whistler Mountain, in the Carleton Lodge, there is an après-ski bar called the Longhorn Saloon. The burgers, I hear, are quite good.

There is an impressively exhaustive list of Microsoft codenames on the Bink.nu site: http://bink.nu/Codenames.bink.

However, Microsoft's approach to Longhorn soon began to change. By the time the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) rolled around in mid-2003, Microsoft was describing Longhorn as a "huge, big, bet-the-company move." Windows XP was being kept current with new updates, including Windows XP Service Pack 2, and new versions of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition. Meanwhile, Longhorn gradually began to accumulate new features that had originally been intended for Blackcomb. By the summer of 2004, Microsoft realized that Longhorn had become the next major Windows OS, so the company revamped the entire Longhorn development process and more or less started the whole thing from scratch. This delayed the release of Longhorn, of course, and the dates kept getting pushed out: to 2005, then to early 2006, and finally to later in 2006. (Microsoft has said that Vista's code will ship to business customers in November, 2006 and will be in the retail channel in January, 2007. As I write this, rumors are swirling that Vista might be delayed yet again, depending on the feedback Microsoft gets from the legions of Beta 2 testers.)

But it wasn't just a revamped development process that was delaying Longhorn. In conferences, demos, and meetings with hardware vendors, developers, and customers, Microsoft had described the new OS and features in the most glowing terms imaginable. This had become a seriously ambitious project that was going to require an equally serious commitment of resources and, crucially, time to make the promises a reality. Unfortunately, time was the one thing that Microsoft didn't have a lot of. Yes, XP was a fine OS and was being kept fresh with updates, but even a 2006 ship date for Longhorn meant an unprecedented five years between major OS releases. Not even mighty Microsoft could afford to keep XP in the channel any longer than that.

In other words, Longhorn had to be complete in 2006 even if it doesn't reach retail shelves until early 2007. Microsoft briefly considered an interim version of Windows that would ship between Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Longhorn. (This stopgap release was codenamed Oasis, but some wags dubbed it Shorthorn.)

"Vista" Unveiled

The codename Longhorn was finally retired when Microsoft announced on July 22, 2005, that the new OS would be called Windows Vista. Why Vista? Because, according to one Microsoft spokesperson, the new OS is "about providing clarity to your world and giving focus to the things that are important to you," and it "provides your view of the world." That sounds like a lot of marketing hoo-ha to my ears, but it's true that Vista does offer some new features that enable you to view your documents in radically new ways (radical for Windows, that is).

To give just one example, you can run a local search right from the Start menu. The resulting window displays a list of all the filesdocuments, email messages, music files, images, and morethat contain the search term. You can then save the results as a search folder. The next time you open the search folder, Vista shows not only the files from the original search, but also any new files you've created that include the search term.

Note

Windows version numbers haven't mattered very much since the days of Windows 3.x and NT 4.0. However, all Windows releases do carry a version number. For example, Windows XP is version 5.1. Just for the record, Windows Vista is version 6.0. If you have Vista, you can see this for yourself: Press Windows Logo+R; type winver; and click OK.

What's Not in Windows Vista

But what of all those fancy new technologies that promised to rock the Windows world? Well, there was simply no way to include all of those features and ship Vista in 2006. Reluctantly, Microsoft had to start dropping features from Vista.

The first major piece to land in the Recycle Bin was Windows Future Storage (WinFS), a SQL Serverbased file system designed to run on top of NTFS and to make it easier to navigate and find documents. WinFS will ship separately after Windows Vista, although as you'll see in this book, some features of WinFS did make it into Vista (see Chapter 4, "File System Improvements").

Microsoft also removed the Windows PowerShell (codenamed Monad and also called the Windows Command Shell or Microsoft Command Shell), a .NET-based command-line scripting language. (However, PowerShell is undergoing a separate beta cycle as I write this, and it's expected to be released around the same time as Vista.)

Microsoft also "decoupled" some important technologies from Vista, which meant that these technologies developed separately and would be released for Vista and "backported" to run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Two major technologies are being backported:

• A new graphics architecture and application programming interface that was code-named Avalon and is now called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

• A new programming platform for building, configuring, and deploying network-distributed services, codenamed Indigo and now called Windows Communications Foundation (WCF)

In both cases, it doesn't mean that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will suddenly look and feel like Windows Vista after you install WPF and WCF. Instead, it means that the older operating systems will be capable of running any applications that use WPF and WCF code. This gives developers more incentive to build applications around these technologies because it ensures a much larger user base than they would otherwise have if WPF and WCF ran only on Vista installations.

Finally, there are also several Vista tools that will be XP "down-level" tools. This means they will be made available as XP downloads, although without certain features that you get in the Vista versions.

• Internet Explorer 7 The XP version doesn't come with Protected Mode or Parental Controls (see "Security Enhancements" and "Internet Explorer 7," later in this chapter).

• Windows Defender On XP, scan times will be slower because XP doesn't track file changes the way Vista does (see "Transactional NTFS," later in this chapter).

• Media Player 11 The XP version won't play content from another PC or device; it won't view content from a Vista Media Library; it won't integrate with the Windows shell; and it won't have Vista's advanced DVD playback features.

The upshot of these deletions, backports, and down-level tools is that Vista is not quite as compelling of a release as it was once touted to be, but there are still plenty of new improvements to make it worth your time.