Programming Windows: A Lap Around Longhorn (Premium)

At the conclusion of Bill Gates’ exciting PDC 2003 opening keynote, which featured Hillel Cooperman showing us Microsoft’s proposed Longhorn user experience for the first time, Microsoft’s chairman ceded the stage to Jim Allchin, the amiable and soft-spoken engineer who led the Windows team. Where the Gates keynote focused on the flash, the Allchin keynote---which was called “a lap around Longhorn”---focused instead on the nuts and bolts of Longhorn app development. And to understand that, Allchin explained, he would start with the following “eye chart,” a detailed architectural representation of the .NET-based WinFX APIs.

PDC 2003 was flush with these types of diagrams, which were handed out to eager showgoers in poster form around the convention hall in addition to being available digitally in our welcome packages. The density of these diagrams was a form of “shock and awe” for developers, they were specifically designed to highlight how dense and technical these APIs were, and how much work that Microsoft’s architects had put into them.

But as Allchin explained, you could also look at the Longhorn software architecture from a higher level, which provided a simpler view in which there were just four key areas: Fundamentals, which included the base operating system services and then the Avalon, WinFS, and Indigo SDKs on top of that. Microsoft was trying to distance itself from .NET at this time, but Fundamentals represented the services we would have previously (and have since) associated with the .NET Framework, while Avalon, WinFS, and Indigo were managed code SDKs that built on top of the .NET Framework, as had other SDKs in the past, like Windows Forms.

In a sign of Microsoft’s ambivalence about .NET during this time, Allchin referred to WinFX as “the next step beyond Win32,” positioning it as a successor to Microsoft’s classical Windows app development technologies. That said, he did at least mention that it “builds on the .NET Framework.” In reality, it was the .NET Framework, a new version of it, and as history will show us, Microsoft eventually brought it to market as such. But on that day, it was clear that the software giant was moving past .NET, at least from a marketing perspective.

“It’s very well structured,” Allchin noted of WinFX, correctly. “This is something we expect to last decades, and so we spent a lot of time thinking about how the classes, the types, the methods, the properties, the events, all fit together so it’s a holistic environment. Actually, every time a new extension is put into this system, it’s reviewed by a set of system architects, and then it’s usability-tested by a set of developers. We think we’re doing a good job. We’re interested in what you provide to us as feedback about this.”

Be still my heart.

WinFX, Allchin explained, would dramatically expand the capabilities available to Windows app developers while doing more...