Gates outlines Longhorn

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 28 Oct 2003 at 17:20

With all the talk of delays to the final release dates of Microsoft's next version of Windows - Longhorn - the operating system must have appeared to have taken a giant leap forward to attendees at the PDC conference yesterday, as Bill Gates and co demo many of the new features of the software.

Bill Gates opened the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles with the words: 'Welcome to the "Longhorn" PDC'.

Longhorn, Microsoft's code-name for its next version of Windows, was very much the headline act for the sold-out show. Gates said his company's R&D budget, which had doubled over the last four years, was 'focused on making "Longhorn" real'. He described the future of software, towards which Longhorn is pushing, as 'not monolithic but it's drivers from many people, the applications from many people, the hardware from many people, preserving that richness and yet making sure that when it comes to the end user, they're having a great experience.'

It might sound more like an open-source approach, but what Gates is driving at is a seamless, yet secure computing experience. For example, VisiCalc, an old 32bit application, will run fine on Longhorn. And under Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base initiative, third-party software will run in isolation from the main system, so matter what you install, it shouldn't compromise or interfere with the operating system at all.

As for Longhorn itself, Gates said: 'This is going to be a very big release - the biggest release of this decade, the biggest since Windows 95.' Although he did add the caveat: 'it's very clear we're at the beginning of this process.'

The 'fundamentals' of Longhorn start with the user interface: Avalon graphics sub system. 'It's built from the bottom up, built around XML,' said Gates. It has features such as clear-type fonts, which are built in, and Windows animations and effects to make organising the desktop much easier and more natural.

More impressively, the WinFS filesystem is built on a database model, which makes for powerful search capabilities. In the demonstration, the My Documents folder was opened, showing a list of more than a thousand files located across the system. Typing in a search term reduces the list available on the fly, not only making it easy to find specific documents, but also throwing up related documents that might otherwise have been hidden away for ever in some far flung folder. It allows you to dynamically create new views of files, by properties such as author, or by subject.

Indigo is Microsoft's code name for the new communications technologies built in to Longhorn. It offers Web services support that integrates them with other services locally and on the network. For example, you could run a single search across any and all connected services, or drag information from the Internet directly to another user on your local network. And you don't have to manually authenticate yourself - it all happens in the background.

Gates also gave the skinny on SP2 for Windows XP, out in beta before the end of the year, which will offer more security for email and browsing, turn on the firewall by default, among other features.