3 ms·

Hey for people that don’t follow windows internals and politics closely, what did the devTools champion ? What are the longhorn ideas that are getting into win

Hey for people that don’t follow windows internals and politics closely, what did the devTools champion ? What are the longhorn ideas that are getting into windows ?

pjmlp 7y ago
Long story short, that you kind have to assemble from blog posts, forum comments, between the lines articles and so on. Longhorn was to be built on top of .NET and there were lots of issues, regarding performance, stability and what not. Apparently it was more a thing of WinDev (owner of Windows and C++) and DevTools (owner of VS and .NET) each pulling to their side instead of collaborating. As proven later by Singularity and Midori it was an achievable goal, when everyone on the team believes on the end goal. Instead Sinofsky team took over, several ideas were dropped, others were reborn in .NET 3.x like WPF, and Vista came to be. Many of the .NET (Longhorn) libraries reappeared in Vista and Windows 7 as COM libraries. See Project Hilo sample, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/06/06/project-hilo-a-complete-c-windows-7-sample-application/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/06/06/project-h... Later WinRT was born, which is an improvement over COM, using IInspectable alongside IUnknown, and .NET Metadata instead of the old COM type libraries. Curiously similar in concept to Ext-VOS, which was in the genesis of .NET, before CLR came to be. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... So WinRT (Win 8.0), eventually became UAP (Win 8.1) and now it is UWP (Win 10). Contrary to many Windows 10 haters belive, UWP isn't tied to the store and each Windows 10 release brings more Win32 "legacy" APIs into UWP. The next generation COM based runtime with interoperability across C++, .NET, JavaScript, Delphi and every other language capable of understanding COM projections. Ah, and thanks to the contributions initially started by Kenny Kerr, which ended up joining the Windows team, the C++/CX language extensions got replaced by C++/WinRT a C++17 framework for UWP.
- zerkten 7y ago
  I think Sinofsky was still in Office when this was happening. He comes into the picture with Windows 8 since Microsoft wanted Windows to be as successful as Office had become. Jim Allchin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin) was in charge at the time of Vista. Office had stuck with regular the regular Windows platform and were focusing on UI and getting into a regular release rhythm under Sinofsky. People forget but Office releases used to be a real crapshoot and Microsoft needed to move to a true subscription model at some point (the original activation wasn't it.) To do this you need regular updates at least a few years apart before you can even get close to what's needed for a subscription business. Sinofsky seems to have been a real success here, but not so much in Windows. Looking back the expectations for Vista could never meet the reality. Windows was fundamentally not ready as a product or team to deliver on any of the promises. This was not much different from Cairo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)) as it turned out. If the focus had been on the fundamentals like regular releases they may have been achieved some of what is promised with the right compromises. I also wouldn't discount some of the hardware changes in the period. We were getting multi-core and there was a transition to 64-bit.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Thanks for the correction regarding Sinofsky . Undoubtedly there were multiple issues at play there. However having been part of such "rebuilt the world" projects, I do believe politics also played an important role, as many signs that came into the outside world feel similar.
  - teddyuk 7y ago
    I'm not sure that is right, Sinofsky was brought in to fix windows dev after the vista fiasco, he did a good job on win 7 then went off piste with the metro ui in win 8 and that was it for him

Hey for people that don’t follow windows internals and politics closely, what did the devTools champion ? What are the longhorn ideas that are getting into windows ?

pjmlp 7y ago

Long story short, that you kind have to assemble from blog posts, forum comments, between the lines articles and so on. Longhorn was to be built on top of .NET and there were lots of issues, regarding performance, stability and what not. Apparently it was more a thing of WinDev (owner of Windows and C++) and DevTools (owner of VS and .NET) each pulling to their side instead of collaborating. As proven later by Singularity and Midori it was an achievable goal, when everyone on the team believes on the end goal. Instead Sinofsky team took over, several ideas were dropped, others were reborn in .NET 3.x like WPF, and Vista came to be. Many of the .NET (Longhorn) libraries reappeared in Vista and Windows 7 as COM libraries. See Project Hilo sample, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/06/06/project-hilo-a-complete-c-windows-7-sample-application/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/06/06/project-h... Later WinRT was born, which is an improvement over COM, using IInspectable alongside IUnknown, and .NET Metadata instead of the old COM type libraries. Curiously similar in concept to Ext-VOS, which was in the genesis of .NET, before CLR came to be. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... So WinRT (Win 8.0), eventually became UAP (Win 8.1) and now it is UWP (Win 10). Contrary to many Windows 10 haters belive, UWP isn't tied to the store and each Windows 10 release brings more Win32 "legacy" APIs into UWP. The next generation COM based runtime with interoperability across C++, .NET, JavaScript, Delphi and every other language capable of understanding COM projections. Ah, and thanks to the contributions initially started by Kenny Kerr, which ended up joining the Windows team, the C++/CX language extensions got replaced by C++/WinRT a C++17 framework for UWP.

zerkten 7y ago
I think Sinofsky was still in Office when this was happening. He comes into the picture with Windows 8 since Microsoft wanted Windows to be as successful as Office had become. Jim Allchin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Allchin) was in charge at the time of Vista. Office had stuck with regular the regular Windows platform and were focusing on UI and getting into a regular release rhythm under Sinofsky. People forget but Office releases used to be a real crapshoot and Microsoft needed to move to a true subscription model at some point (the original activation wasn't it.) To do this you need regular updates at least a few years apart before you can even get close to what's needed for a subscription business. Sinofsky seems to have been a real success here, but not so much in Windows. Looking back the expectations for Vista could never meet the reality. Windows was fundamentally not ready as a product or team to deliver on any of the promises. This was not much different from Cairo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)) as it turned out. If the focus had been on the fundamentals like regular releases they may have been achieved some of what is promised with the right compromises. I also wouldn't discount some of the hardware changes in the period. We were getting multi-core and there was a transition to 64-bit.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Thanks for the correction regarding Sinofsky . Undoubtedly there were multiple issues at play there. However having been part of such "rebuilt the world" projects, I do believe politics also played an important role, as many signs that came into the outside world feel similar.
- teddyuk 7y ago
  I'm not sure that is right, Sinofsky was brought in to fix windows dev after the vista fiasco, he did a good job on win 7 then went off piste with the metro ui in win 8 and that was it for him