Programming Windows: Whistler and Blackcomb (Premium)

Microsoft released new Windows versions at a torrid pace in the late 1990s, with two major releases—Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium Edition (Me)—arriving back-to-back in the year 2000. But the software giant had even bigger plans for the near future, with two major Windows releases, codenamed Whistler and Blackcomb respectively, that would usher in the .NET era and rebrand Windows to Windows.NET.

That wasn’t the original plan. As the 1990s ended, Microsoft was working to consolidate its NT- and MS-DOS-based versions of Windows into a single product line that combined the reliability and security of the former with the compatibility of the latter. But the technological merger kept getting pushed back. The original target was Windows 2000, which started life as Windows NT 5.0, a release that Microsoft wanted to be a “superset” of Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0.

When that proved impossible, Microsoft hastily improvised a final DOS-based Windows release, Windows Me, that would include some of the end-user features Microsoft had planned the canceled Windows 2000 Personal edition. This bought Microsoft some time and it gave PC makers a new Windows version to market for the holiday 2000 selling season.

More importantly, Windows Me provided Microsoft with a relatively small and safe public testing base for emerging technologies like Activity Centers, System Restore, System File Protection, Automatic Updates, Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) for cameras and scanners, support for the hibernation power management state, a new networking stack, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), and much more. Windows Me also hid—but did not remove—access to Real Mode MS-DOS for the first time, prepping the userbase for the DOS-less future to come.

With Windows 2000 and Windows Me still in development, Microsoft planned a second release of Windows 2000 for the year 2001 that would come in both consumer (Neptune) and business (Odyssey) versions. A single leaked Neptune build showed something very similar to Windows Me, but with the NT/2000 underpinnings. And I don’t believe that Odyssey ever leaked, not that it mattered: by the time Microsoft was finalizing the development of Windows 2000 and Me, it had canceled Neptune and Odyssey, and I was the first to report this change, in January 2000.

“Microsoft has canceled the previously separate ‘Neptune’ and ‘Odyssey’ projects,” I wrote in the January 21, 2000 issue of WinInfo Short Takes, “melding the two into a cohesive strategy for the future of Windows 2000. ‘Neptune,’ as you may know, was to be the next consumer version of Windows after Millennium, and the first to be based on Windows 2000. And ‘Odyssey’ was the previous codename for the next version of Windows 2000 for businesses. My sources tell me that the consumer version of Neptune became a black hole when all the features that were cut from Millennium (Windows 98 Third Edition, due this summer) were simply re-tagged as Neptune features. And since Neptune and Odyssey would be based on the same codebase anyway, it made sense to combine them into a single project, in the same way that Windows 2000 Professional and Server were tested together. What’s the codename for this revamped next-generation version of Windows 2000 that will come in business and consumer flavors, you ask? It’s called ‘Whistler.’ You heard it here first.”

This revelation proved momentous for the day. The new Whistler codename was quickly covered by every tech publication, and I received phone calls and emails from around the globe requesting more information, and I spoke about the change on CNET Radio. I also heard from friends at Microsoft who expressed shock that I had heard about this strategy change so quickly.

“Sources close to Microsoft expressed their amazement that I had even found out about the plans to drop Neptune and Odyssey as the internal communications about replacing these projects with ‘Whistler’ are marked as ‘Extreme Microsoft Internal,’ normally reserved for the company’s most sensitive information,” I wrote at the time.

Microsoft’s official response to this leak was to simply acknowledge Whistler’s existence. In speeches throughout 2000, Bill Gates and other executives referred to Whistler in passing as if that had been the plan all along. But the software giant also knew something I did not: where Neptune and Odyssey were obvious follow-ups to Windows 2000, Whistler—and all future Windows releases—would be infused with .NET.

At WinHEC 2000 in April, Microsoft’s Chad Magendanz said during a Bill Gates speech that Whistler would incorporate support for writeable (CD-R) and rewritable (CD-RW) CD-ROMs, DVD ROM, IAAA-1394 (later called Firewire), and new display technologies. He showed off a “user-friendly logon screen” (later called Welcome), NetMeeting, and USB digital camera support, and improvements to the Windows imaging acquisition wizard, which would debut in Windows Me.

As intriguing, Gates talked up some coming PC form factors that might transform the industry. He spoke of “PCs architected for the entertainment center,” which would “supply all your entertainment needs in one place, your audio, your video, your DVD playback, your movies on demand, your cable box, your high definition television, your satellite receivers, all of that infrastructure.” And he spoke of the tablet PC that he was personally championing inside of Microsoft.

Windows 2000 launched in February 2000 and it opened 64-bit Windows Developer’s Lab in Redmond to aid in the migration to a 64-bit codebase. Which was not the 64-bit codebase we know and love today but rather the Itanium processor platform (IA-64), which Intel had co-developed with HP (the latter of which had purchased Compaq and its Alpha processor, which was Microsoft’s original 64-bit target). The goal was to ship a 64-bit version of Windows 2000 Server as soon as possible, and to support that release with the IA-64 Windows Software Development Kit (SDK), a Microsoft C/C++ compiler and linker for IA-64, and various tools and documentation.

Microsoft then finalized Windows Me on June 19, 2000, and it began promoting the PC health, digital media, home networking, and online experience improvements that consumers would get when the product launched in September. But that promotion was half-hearted at best: with consumer interest in the product line waning, there were no midnight madness events as in the past. Instead, Windows Me launched to the public via a lame “Meet Me Tour” that brought three 1,024 square-foot traveling displays to shopping malls in 25 U.S. cities between September and November. Yes, like 80s pop star Tiffany.

2000 was, of course, also the year that Microsoft announced its .NET initiative, first via a confusing and vague set of promo videos at Forum 2000 in June and then more concretely, to developers, at PDC 2000 that July. But during his “vision” keynote at PDC, Bill Gates explained how Windows and .NET would come together, and that this work would start with Whistler.

“The next two releases of Windows are where you’ll see .NET really built into the user interface,” Mr. Gates said. “The Whistler release of Windows is the next big one that comes out. That’s next year in the second half, and there are really two things that are very exciting there. One is that we get the entire Windows marketplace moved over to the NT technology. So it will be Windows 2000 Professional at the high end [and] Windows 2000 Personal on the consumer machine. And so whether it’s device drivers, reliability, or the richness of security in the file system, that is there for every user of a new version of Windows.”

That user interface bit is interesting, as Microsoft’s original vision for .NET prominently promoted a new .NET “user experience” that would span from Windows to the web, but it never really materialized in Windows despite many leaks of the proposed new interface. But Gates also explained other ways that .NET would be integrated into Whistler. There would be file system integration with “a Microsoft community site … in the cloud” that sounds like an early reference to what later became OneDrive, but was instead related to website publishing. .NET And Passport integration so that one could create a password on a PC and use that to authenticate against compatible websites.

“So Whistler will be a major release,” Gates intoned, “not in the sense that Windows 2000 was, but in the sense of this road map that we’re heading down.”

And then he dropped a bombshell.

“The release that comes after [Whistler], which has been code-named Blackcomb, that’s where you will see the most profound change in the user interface,” he said. “We’ll move to have a pervasive typing line that will recognize the sentence that you’re typing in. This is where we will really assume that the system has an information agent that’s working on your behalf, and filtering all the changes that take place.”

Most interesting, to me, Gates noted that Blackcomb would not bring any changes to the programming model. Those changes would arrive, instead, via .NET.

“This is the programming model that we’ll simply be building on for the next five or six years,” he said. “A change like what you’ve witnessed with what goes on in the .NET framework can only take place every five or six years. This framework is a much cleaner framework than we’ve ever had before, but it’s also ready to connect up to this XML world that these new Windows releases will usher in.”

This was a major development. While each version of Windows requires additions to the Windows SDK, Gates was making it clear that the programming model of the future was based on .NET and not the C-based Win32 API used by the traditional SDK. That said, a coming generation of more powerful PCs would also need to run legacy code, and so Gates also discussed the transition to 64-bit computing, which he explained would be much easier than the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit.

“Going from 16-bit to 32-bit was a dramatic reshaping of the memory model,” he said. “Now, fortunately, as we go from 32-bit to 64-bit, that’s not changing at all, you simply take 32-bit pointers, they become 64-bit pointers. There is a new instruction set here. It’s an instruction set that Intel and its partners like HP have poured billions of dollars into.”

Gates announced the release of the promised IA-64 Windows SDK, though one has to wonder if there was a single developer at the show who could even test such a thing. Regardless, the work that Microsoft put into IA-64 would later pay dividends when the industry moved in a different direction for 64-bit computing.

Leaked Whistler builds appeared throughout 2000, and I published my first look at this new Windows version in April 2000 ahead of Microsoft’s WinHEC reveal.

Microsoft issued invites for the Whistler preview to close partners and customers in May, and it seeded “key first wave ISV and IHV developers, [PC maker] partners, JDP [joint deployment partner] accounts, committed IT Pros, corporate deployment testbeds … and key consumer testers” with early CD installs of Whistler Personal, Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Whistler64 (for IA-64 in 64-bit Professional and  Server versions only), in addition to the SDK, DDK (device driver kit), and checked builds that enabled debugging for developers.

In July, I reported that Microsoft had issued the first Whistler preview, build 2250, to early testers.

“Whistler build 2250 includes a simple new ‘skinning’ feature called Visual Styles that lets you apply a ‘classic’ or ‘professional’ look-and-feel to the user interface (UI).” I wrote at the time. “But the interface changes are relatively mild compared to what Microsoft has in store further down the road: you’ll find color changes here and there and a much friendlier Control Panel applet than was previously available. Other changes in Whistler 2250 include new Explorer view styles, a Remote Desktop feature in the Professional Edition, and numerous other small tweaks. But Whistler, which is identified as Windows version 5.1 in System Properties, isn’t a huge change from Windows Me or Windows 2000.”

The skinning feature was interesting, with Microsoft offering the new look and feel in Whistler Personal and non-domain-joined Whistler Professional installs by default, and then the classic look and feel in domain-joined Professional and server installs.

“The idea is to have two products at two price points, one for entry-level and typical users (primarily via new PCs) and one for advanced/power/enthusiast users,” Microsoft told early testers. “Most power users/enthusiasts consider themselves professional-type users anyway, and they will, for the most part, know they want the Pro box based on the feature set.”

Microsoft finally released the first public beta version of Whistler on October 31, 2000. This beta was distributed to a broader group of key partners and customers, and to over 200,000 software developers via MSDN, the paid developer subscription that Microsoft had released earlier that year.

“The release of ‘Whistler’ beta 1 represents the next step in delivering on our vision for Windows and will provide software and hardware vendors with a single code base on which to develop applications and devices for both home and business PC users,” Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine said at the time. “This release will help us continue to receive the feedback we need, which will help ensure broad compatibility of software applications and hardware devices and ultimately provide the best customer experience.”

The beta 1 release introduced a more exciting visual style than what we had seen in previous preview builds. This included the first substantial visual change to the Start menu via a new simple Start menu—users could switch to classic if desired—and a new look and feel dubbed Watercolor because of its pastel colors.

As the year 2000 wound down, Microsoft’s stated goals for Whistler were to enhance the home networking and digital media experiences from Windows Me, “deliver the most-advanced home-computing experience,” and evolve the performance, reliability, and management prowess of Windows 2000. It would ship in client versions for consumers and business customers, and in a server version, and there would be a 64-bit version of the latter for IA-64. As for the schedule, Microsoft said that it planned “a phased release of ‘Whistler,’ beginning with the desktop products and followed by the server versions,” But both desktop and server versions were expected “to be generally available in the second half of 2001.”

The assumption, of course, was that Whistler would come to market as Windows.NET, as Microsoft had announced that name back at PDC 2000 in July. But in November, the software giant threw onlookers a curveball: in a press release citing Bill Gates’ “state of the industry” speech at COMDEX in November, where he demonstrated an early Tablet PC prototype, Microsoft referred to Whistler as Windows 2001. Gates, we were told, “explained that cutting-edge hardware and software companies are excited and already planning for the Windows 2001 launch.”

That was just a typo, Microsoft claimed, though I was careful to archive the original press release before they corrected it. But Microsoft was indeed plotting a name change for Whistler, and it had even bigger changes in store for the Whistler user experience in 2001.

And neither, as it turns out, would involve .NET at all.