Sunday night saw the release of several screenshots of Longhorn Build 5203. Many questions arose, in particular on Microsoft’s Longhorn newsgroups. Mike Brannigan from Microsoft has taken the liberty to have tried to answer everyone’s questions, questions often repeatedly asked.
*crickets*
i’m happy to see that vapourware is becoming a less effective marketing stratergy
I think vapourware is still effective for marketing, you just need to make sure the vapours turns into solid state before similar products from your competitors hits the market. This is where Microsoft have failed this time. From what I understand MacOS-X does most if not all of the things that Longhorn will do, and Linux is to close behind to be comfortable for Microsoft.
Another thing, the vapour must smell significantly better than the food the customer allready have on his plate or he will not follow. Today winNT4/win2k/winXP fills the needs of most businesses there is really no reason to smell out slightly new flavors of windows.
“*crickets*
i’m happy to see that vapourware is becoming a less effective marketing stratergy”
Um, vapourware? So you mean the copy that I have installed for testing is vapourware. Duke nukem forever, now that is vapourware.
I don’t think you understand perfectly. Longhorn will do much more than OSX. Does OSX have something like Avalon? No. How about something like Indigo? No. Those are two huge things Longhorn has that OSX doesn’t. And there are many more little things.
Indigo = Webobjects
Avalon = InterfaceBuilder
Both have been around for a very long time. Of course if you mean “OSX doesn’t” in the terms of .NET integration, you’re right, but why would you want that if you weren’t developing on/for a MS platform?
Avalon will be nothing more than a gussied up window designer ala VS.NET’s dialog editor, except with 5000 more options, and much more arcane xml syntax to go along with it.
And of course, it will be in all managed code rather than native (like WO and IB/Xcode). A true accomplishment.
> Avalon = InterfaceBuilder
Avalon = Macromedia Flex, which isn’t yet available for Mac OS X…
actually os x has had something like avalon since mac os x jaguar. it’s more commonly known as quartz extreme.
what exactly IS indigo? i don’t think i’ve met anyone who can say no only what it is, what it does, but what is it even good for or what problem does it solve?
Indigo is basically an API to generate web service applications. Its basically the next incarnation of Web Services in the .Net Framework.
From Microsoft:
Advanced Web services support in Indigo provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. Indigo’s service-oriented programming model is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and simplifies development of connected systems. Indigo unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable and extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies and hosting models. Indigo will be available for Windows “Longhorn” as well as for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/pillars/Indigo/def…
It does alot more than just generate web service applications; non-webbased applications can use, and are suggested to use Indigo rather than the mirade of different technologies; DCOM, COM etc. etc. I’m sure Windows programmers here can rattle off the laudry list of technologies Microsoft have tried and failed with.
Lets hope that this, Indigo, finally brings to developers the holy grail they require.
I’ve been using Indigo for a while now; having been exposed to WebObjects in the past I can safely say that Indigo is much broader and deeper in scope than WebObjects. Indigo is much more than web services; it’s a fully managed library that wraps up MSMQ, Remoting, Web Services, Sockets, and some aspects of COM+ into a single unified programming interface/API rather than the disparate namespace mess we have now. It’s pretty impressive actually. Of course it won’t have much impact on a normal home user, but from a development standpoint it’s a godsend (for .Net at least); businesses will gain a lot from this.
You mean Indigo is nothing but a big wrapper on existing
web & networking technology as defined by Microsoft.
And you call it new “technology” and innovation…
This is marketspeak, no techspeak. Buzz-word based innovation does not bring any actual technologies to the table.
QE is not even comparable to Avalon. QE would be more comparable to the desktop compositing engine (and the Longhorn one, at this point, is more advanced than QE).
Indigo is basically a communication layer for applications, services, etc…
This is just more of the same hype. Longhorn is so far from stable that I feel sorry for all the other “invited testers” who are wasting their time. I am certainly not wasting mine anymore.
OSX has had rough equivalents to M$’s unreleased Longhorn OS features for at least a couple of years now. They don’t match feature to feature, but Longhorn isn’t RELEASED yet so I’d have to say Apple easily and decisively gets the most nods here.
“Does OSX have something like Avalon? No. How about something like Indigo? No.”
Do END USERS care about buzz words like that. No
Do END USERS care about buzz words like that. No
Since when has MS actually cared about what the end users think?
well since windows is geared towards end users that makes your statement invalid
Who has more pull in how Windows is developed? The end-users or the OEMs, developers, and business world?
Another MS thread infested with Mac Zealots with nothing worthwhile to say.
Reading the comments here it’s easy to see why Apple decided 2 mouse buttons would be too complicated for it’s users.
I’m all for constructive criticism but without content it’s nothing more than zealotry.
zzzzzzz
quote: Reading the comments here it’s easy to see why Apple decided 2 mouse buttons would be too complicated for it’s users.
Now THAT’s constructive…
Geez… Can anyone prevent all zealots and trolls from posting?
Reading the comments here it’s easy to see why Apple decided 2 mouse buttons would be too complicated for it’s users.
I used a Mac IIci as my main workstation for six years, and I found that a single-button mouse actually worked quite well, even in tools like MS Word 5 and MacDraw Plus. I’ve since used 1-, 2-, and 3-button mice with Macs at various times, and all it takes is a minor adjustment.
Point blank, it isn’t a big deal for experienced users, and if you’re ever seen a completely inexperienced user try to figure out mouse navigation, I suspect you’d have a little more appreciation for the single-button choice that was made. Macs came out before any other GUIs were commonplace, so it was a new concept for a lot of people.
Windows users also seem to forget that Microsoft was very slow to assign much functionality to the right mouse button on a two-button mouse (beyond “escape”) in the first place — I still remember Windows 3.x users making fun of OS/2’s heavy use of the RMB to bring up context menus on the desktop and in applications and calling it far too complicated for most users.
It’s interesting how time changes people’s viewpoint, isn’t it, and that sometimes folks take the opposite position once their pet platform changes its behavior.
I find it hysterical that someone will say OS X doesn’t have “Avalon” or “Indigo” and all they are is re-branded copies of Apple technologies that have been available to the general public for YEARS.
It’s even funnier when you think about the fact that this person is bragging about the fact they will have these re-branded knock-offs a year-and-a-half from now.
And that is assuming Microsoft doesn’t slip Longhorn for the 7th time.
Thanks for the laugh. Seriously.
I can’t see how this is vaporware then it’s a working daily build of longhorn, probably a bit old already since they make new ones every day and use them.
If you are calling it vaporware because it’s not yet released then that’s different, but it’s there and if you can test it and run it, it’s very much real, all be it not complete.
Ok, here is the rundown, people.
Indigo == WebObjects dot NET. Web Services is nothing new, move along, people. BTW, Microsoft helped INVENT AJAX (XmlHttpRequest, anyone?).
Avalon == Mozilla’s XUL + SVG + Quartz Extreme + Core Image + VRML tied up into one API. Throw in a shiny new DirectX and we’re set. Resolution independent display models, even if they cheat and use “virtual pixels” for compatibility, is petter for all of us. Any font in 72 point should be 1 inch no matter WHAT monitor you show it on. Oh, and yes, they throw in Yet Another XML Derivative, XAML, for declaring UI elements. All hail teh 3y3 c4ndy and teh Snappy (TM).
dotNet == Wait, I don’t need to explain this. There have been hundreds of articles, many on this site, explaining what .Net is.
WinFX == what happens when you integrate dotNet with Indigo and Avalon. What you’ll be using in Visual Studio 2005 and up.
IE7 == Explorer.exe with the advent of Avalon. But it should improve on IE6 SP2. All below WinXP users should just switch to Firefox or Opera. Right now. Party’s over. Be glad you still get security patches.
WinFS == Spotlight + SQL Server + ReiserFS 3 on top of NTFS. Reiser 4 potentially spanks all of this, being the luxurious high performance almost-a-database file system it is. Unfortunately, there’s a LOT of Linux kernel drama surrounding it, and not much USES all the sweet features of it yet. Oh, and Solaris ZFS 0wns j00 as well.
Monad == Python. (Monad is Microsoft’s new scripting language). This is a direct effort to win open minded Unix geeks over. It even allows scripting of .Net Objects, supposedly. Note that Monad can only kill CMD if you can kill Explorer.exe and use windows productively through Monad ALONE. Also, it has to be small and fast.
Security == a process and not a feature. Sane defaults, reduced privileges, etc. See default installs of any decent Unix-alike.
Trusted etc.: Yes, it can be useful, yes it can be abused. Yes, they may not give us a choice. Yes, it sucks and Orwell mocks us from beyond.
AERO == Microsoft’s attempt at beating Apple (Aqua), Renderman (Enlightenment), Gnome (Canvas), and QT/KDE (Arthur) at the eyecandy game. Die, Luna, Die. Note that Aqua, Luna, and Aero are all 4-letter words.
Metro == somewhere between PDF and PostScript with XML tossed in somewhere.
Any other MS technologies you want to compare?
–JM
jamcnair(at)gmail(dot)com
Mod him up! He gives a very good overview. Couldn’t say it better.
Has anyone here actually even bothered to read the documentation on Longhorn prior to commenting on how terrible it will be? Oh well, it does not really matter since the majority of you will be using it when it is released. This is a significant release that will actually change a number of things about day to day computing. In a symbolic way it very similar to the release of Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.
I grow tired for watching people endlessly complain about how Microsoft does not do XYZ and that there platform has done it for 10 years. The problem is that this introduces technology into the mainstream. This website is almost beginning to sound like a “hate group.” Its almost like one of those silly websites that does not like a certain race or gender because of their own disillusioned and paranoid conception of themselves. Grow up people, Microsoft, like Apple and any of the many GNU/Linux distros has a number of interesting aspects to bring to the table.
I grow tired for watching people endlessly complain about how Microsoft does not do XYZ and that there platform has done it for 10 years.
If Microsoft didn’t make such a big deal about how all of these older technologies that they’re adopting are “innovative”, I suspect many of us wouldn’t care one way or the other.
It’s hard to sit back and sit quiet, however, when the company continues to overstate their accomplishments and hype their products in the press for years before their actual release.
I suspect you’d see a less hostile attitude towards Microsoft on hobbyist/technophile web sites like this if they’d shut their pieholes and write decent code.
starting to sound like a hate group? It’s been one for as long as I can remember.
Talk about off topic, jeez. People have been arguing about ‘Longhorn this, Longhorn that.” The WHOLE point of the article is simply to get the facts straight about build 5203. Here’s the deal: If you care, read it. If you don’t, shut up, and go elsewhere. This is not the place to have your petty flame wars. I for one am glad Longhorn has most of it’s features, and I’m excited enough about it to apply to be a beta tester… and I’m an avid Linux user. (I use linux EVERY day).
Point blank: Longhorn is windows next version. If you want a say in what goes into it, become a beta tester, and give feedback. If you think that more needs to be done, and it’s ‘obvious’, tell them so. Otherwise, please, go install [insert other OS here].
(I don’t mean to be an @$$, but people, grow up, ok?)
–Mac
Does that guy really work for Microsoft? He seemed to barely a thing about Longhorn. Who else at Microsoft doesn’t have a clue as to what features it will have or where it’s going? Everyone it would seem…
not if i’m not getting paid for it…
And i mean it, MS makes money out of it, why not sharing it with the testers…
A good aproach would be to offer rewards for bug reports (first come first served basis)
Active Windows beta testers get 5 free licenses for that version of Windows…. which ain’t bad at all.
Really..?
Then where can get more info about it…
If what you say is true then Maybe, I’ll apply..?