Prometheus 6   

Seven Things To Keep In

Seven Things To Keep In Mind About Longhorn
By Mary Jo Foley

As the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) countdown clock ticks down -- at this writing, we're 19 days, 14 hours and 36 minutes away from the Longhorn stampede, according to one enthusiast's Web site -- it's a good time to start separating Longhorn fact from fiction.

…Rather than take the easy way out, why not help folks get a better handle on exactly what Longhorn is/isn't, especially as the PDC hype-o-meter really gets in gear? In that spirit, here is a list of the key subsystems around which Microsoft is allegedly organizing Longhorn. (This is based on a document that we hear Microsoft's own Windows team is circulating internally.) The alleged 1,000-plus-page "Book of Longhorn" is divided into seven sections:

1. Aero, the 3D-rendering user interface;

2. Avalon, the core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling graphics/presentation chores;

3. Indigo, the next release of Microsoft's Web-services infrastructure that will underlie the OS; think .NET Remoting + MSMQ + ASMX + .NET Enterprise Services (a k a COM+);

4. WinFS, the Windows File System data-store that Longhorn will borrow from Microsoft's SQL Server "Yukon" database; will be able to store XML and metadata in a single place;

5. Real-time communications and speech, meaning the instant-messaging, P2P technology and the core speech API that will be built into the platform;

6. Trustworthy Computing/security, which, in Longhorn's case, will consist largely of the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or "Palladium," code;

7. And last but not least, the catch-all category of Fundamentals. My guess as to what falls into this group? Integrated workflow capabilities; rights-management; perhaps even the good old .Net Framework.

There's still a lot TBD (to be determined) regarding Longhorn. We hear the client version of the operating system will come in consumer and business flavors. Exactly how many of each is far from final.