Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX 681
Theaetetus writes "Microsoft today unveiled its most detailed look yet at its new OS, Longhorn, due in 2006, during Bill Gates' keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. An article at Internet Week describes some of the goals: avoiding viruses, worms, and 'building apps that are as smart as Outlook.'" The company "also unveiled 'WinFX,' which it described as a new application programming model for Windows that is the evolution of its .NET programming framework."
Re:That's a goal? (Score:2, Informative)
That was my reaction, too, but in all fairness a large part of the virus-infection problem lies with the end user who clicks on every attachment they receive. Perhaps Microsoft should put some effort into making an Online Help or "Intro to Windows" that's interesting enough to make the average user sit through it once. And make sure to stress some basic security practices in these presentations.
GMD
This is (Score:0, Informative)
Screenshots Longhorn and some other info. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not impressed yet (Score:2, Informative)
Win32 dog (Score:5, Informative)
The WinFX announcement confirms something that I had suspected for quite a while, and that is that .NET was meant to be a replacement for the Win32 API. Win32 is the "familiar" application framework for Windows, but as many have noted (and most Win32 developers know), it is a complicated, cumbersome beast. Give me a choice between Win32 and raw Xlib and I'd take Xlib, thank you very much (but Win32 is a full blown C API with windowing functions just one of many facets, so don't read into this comparison too much.)
Anyway, Win32 is implemented as one of many subsystems on NT and all its successor operating systems. .NET, and now WinFX, are/will be implemented in the same way, as just another set of APIs. But this is significant, because Microsoft hasn't done this just for kicks. I believe they are on the way to offing Win32. Why?
1) It's 32-bit, and the IA32/x86 market has its days numbered now. Honestly, not many of us need 64-bit computing, but at some point, killer apps will appear. As we all know, Microsoft's preferred method of forcing an OS "upgrade" down people's throats is bundling it with hardware. Aha.
2) It's not portable. This ties into the first point, but why might Microsoft be interested in portability? I don't just mean hardware, I'm talking about OS portability. Microsoft wants a contingency in case Windows (NT/2000/XP/2003/Longhorn...) finds itself becoming a legacy system (I think it already is, but that's just my opinion.) Maybe it's finally dawned on Microsoft that a VMS-based kernel with heavy process invocation fees isn't going to be able to win benchmarks while Linux keeps getting faster and better. Microsoft is only winning server benchmarks by virtue of building their SMB/CIFS and HTTP daemons into the kernel, you know. Who cares about stability? Benchmarks sell software to IT-ignorant PHBs.
3) Win32 is messy, and most Windows C(++) programmers avoid using Win32 directly at all costs (that's what MFC and ATL are for). Microsoft likes DRM, and DRM requires kernel/subsystem-level API calls. Likewise DirectX, which Microsoft is truly investing in; they know multimedia is their strong point and that the enterprise server market is something they can never corner. SMEs running VB apps using MS SQL, maybe, but not Fortune 500. So, they want a framework that is as "open" and "powerful" as Microsoft believes it can be, without opening up the source, of course.
So... whew. There you go.
Re:MS's bottom line... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's a goal? (Score:2, Informative)
You may already have found this out, but the exchange admin can even configure that behavior to stop (if they want). We generally leave it on to encourage people to use file compression; all our computers have winzip installed.
Actually, I understand what Gates was saying with his Outlook comment. As an piece of software, you can do a real lot of things with Exchange/Outlook, much more than just email. The pity is that most people never use those things, because using Exchange for just email is like using a sledgehammer to drive in nails.
I call BS -- I use Outlook Web Access with Firebird from home with absolutely no problems. It works differently than it does if you use IE, but it still works.
Misinformation is rampant around here regarding MS. Its a shame when technical people lie; being objective is *supposed* to be our virtue, but is rarely the case.
Re:That's a goal? (Score:1, Informative)
Some good pics and commentary... (Score:3, Informative)
Longhorn SDK site on msdn: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's a goal? (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. There's nothing you can do about stopping someone from emailing a virus. You can stop it at an email gateway of course, but nothings 100%. I accept that.
What I don't accept is virus that are automatically executed simply by viewing an email in the preview pane. As soon as you click on it, you're infected.
We've mostly got visual basic scripting to thank for that.
I have to agree. What really gets me is I see the title of the message, right click on it so I can delete it, before I can delete it the virus scanner on my machine goes off and the menu goes away. A mail goes to my IT support and they yell at me for downloading viruses. And I get something like 20-40 of these a day.
And the rules in outlook to delete the messages don't work worth anything. Most of them say they're from microsoft. So I set up a rule to say 'if its from microsoft and it contains an attachment delete it' but does this work? No. Also alot of them say 'here is the qmail program' and I have a rule to turf those, but it only gets about half of them.
There is nothing you can do about these viruses as a user of an exchange server with Outlook. But we have to use it for meetings and resource scheduling, which is a piece of crap! Microsoft has almost a monopoly on this in small to meduim bussinesses. I've also used two of the other big time mail/scheduling software (lotus notes and novell groupwise) and they're crap too. But we can't use gnu in the office right now, damn SCO.
Re:That's a goal? (Score:3, Informative)
My old company, www.appligent.com, wrote a tool to work around this. I'd feel negligant if I didn't inform you about APActiveCheck and APStripFiles. APStripFiles is free ($).
http://www.appligent.com/products/applications/
http://www.appli
Dom
What the world doesn't need is another desktop bar (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway. Why are they adding yet another desktop bar? It wastes space, it looks ugly, and it's difficult to remove. If they're going to add yet *another* taskbar to the OS, please allow it to be turned off!
Re:That's a goal? (Score:5, Informative)
2. Change this to "Restricted Sites"
3. Zone Settings - OK
4. Disable everything
Outlook is now sanitized for your protection!
Now why this isn't the default, well that's something we can blame on MS, but its not unavoidable. Oh and, just because I haven't done it before (and if I don't someone will):
5. ?
6. Profit!
Re:Will some people migrate instead of re-train? (Score:1, Informative)
I doubt its easier to Migrate to linux, especially since the extra effort will result in less functionality - the work you put in migrating to
XML based gui development - code behind for GUI'S! (XAML, Adobe AfterEffects now creates Windows GUIs! - designers now generate gui's directly instead of giving a mockup for a programmer to design.)
Access to WinFS - a centralized filesystem with EXTENDABLE SCHEMAS - you basically have the power of XML-based metadata and an SQL Filesystem, but with extremely simple ease of programming. No more managing your data objects - you can make a web service call, download the data to WinFS, and attatch metadata. Now someone can browse their hard drive and see your application's data right there due to the extended metadata.
Indigo - a new communications framework for local and remote web-services. Components now can communicate internally via webservices.
WinFX - enhanced compositing engine where you can do vector graphics, embed media into ANYTHING in the os (they had streaming videos in a thumbnail in a freaking scrollbar!)
If you were at PDC maybe you would understand - I've programmed on dozens of operating systems during my life, doing everything from Linux Kernel Hacking, to JVM Development, to Robotics to Windows Development, and what exists in Longhorn is something absolutely incredible
Also it's not bloatware - all the PDC folks got REAL copies, and did HANDS ON LABS on Programming the applications that were demoed.
It's a real app folks, and its coming.