Programming Windows: Alpha Tales (Premium)

Windows had a busy 2002 between Windows XP Service Pack 1 and the new Media Center and Tablet PC Editions. But enthusiasts were more concerned about the future of Windows, which we were told would now take a pitstop at Longhorn before moving on to Blackcomb. And there were many leaks, fakes, rumors, and even official releases with which to contend that year.

Today, personal technology is similarly consumed by leaks and rumors, but we don’t see a lot in the way of fakes. Instead, more technically capable fans create concept art of imagined future products from Apple, especially. And these concepts are often published on enthusiast blogs to help pass the time between actual product announcements.

The 2002 equivalents of these concepts, which I simply called fakes, were much less sophisticated. And because it was Microsoft, and not Apple, at the center of the personal computing world, they focused mostly on software, and not hardware.

Many were based on Steve Guggenheimer’s ill-timed demo of future MSN interfaces from late summer 2001, as it was widely misunderstood to represent the user experience Microsoft was creating for Longhorn. And many were laughably bad.

Interestingly, even the worst of the fakes were pointing in the right direction: with both MSN and Windows, Microsoft was wrestling with a new user interface convention called a dashboard or sidebar that would display notifications and live data in a pane on the side of the screen that would be visible at all times. It was essentially a front-end for web services. Consider, for example, this Microsoft Research project.

Because it was revised so often, this interface had appeared first in limited form the MSN 6 user interface via a My Stuff bar that included links to MSN Calendar, MSN Money stock quotes, MSN Communities, MSN Photos, and online weather. But in MSN 8, this interface was renamed to Dashboard, and it had been recast as “the open bar” that Guggenheimer had described a year earlier.

The MSN 8 Dashboard was an extensible interface, based on XML, that could be positioned on either side of the display, and it could be detached from the rest of the MSN 8 interface so that it appeared on-screen at all times.

And Dashboard components---called parts---would display live information and could provide a fly-out window with more detailed information.

Internally, Microsoft spent much of 2002 gearing up for the Longhorn wave, which would bring major changes to Windows application development for the first time since the initial release of .NET and Windows Forms. At WinHEC 2002 in April, the firm explained to hardware makers that Longhorn would offer a richer text experience with better font management and hardware acceleration. It would be based on ClearType, which to that date used software-based rendering techniques, but now with a “composition” pass in the display technologies that would render items on-screen.

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