Programming Windows: Geeks Bearing Gifts (Premium)

At 8:00 am on October 27, 2003, Microsoft opened the doors to Hall A at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and a melee ensued as the assembled developers and other geeks literally elbowed and fought each other for a prime position near the stage. The goal? To bear witness as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates revealed Longhorn, and with it, the future of computing—in full for the first time.

Those familiar with the history of Microsoft and Windows know that this moment was the single most exciting time in that history, an apex at which anything seemed possible. And that the excitement was all too brief, to be followed by a distressingly long period of inaction, uncertainty, and, ultimately, failure. But having successfully elbowed my way to the front of the crowd, I waited with everyone else, excited, and unaware of the disappointments to come.

And then it started.

Microsoft flashed a promotional video on-screen that started with imagery of the past but then dazzled the audience with a quick-fire series of Longhorn imagery backed by the rocking strain of “Horndog” by Overseer. Dubbed “Aero Rocks,” the video promised that Longhorn was “about ideas that inspire,” that Microsoft would “make the future happen … today!” (which seemed like a riff on my website’s slogan, “the future of Windows … today!”) We would “work smarter, AND harder,” it intoned. “We don’t see pixels, we see pictures,” it continued, as stunning transparent UI imagery flashed by. “We’re geeks bearing gifts. And. We’re. Just. Getting. Started.”

The video, and the music, stopped. And the crowd erupted as Bill Gates walked to the podium onstage, smiling as the applause continue to grow, raining down on him. He welcomed everyone to “the Longhorn PDC.” And then he proceeded to bore the living shit out of everybody there, robbing the room of its excitement, for nearly 40 straight minutes. With his characteristically nasal voice, Gates explained how Microsoft and the industry had gotten to this point, and he detailed the advances that would enable his firm to deliver on what he called “the digital decade.”

He bored us with talk of Trustworthy Computing, Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP2), and the coming advances to auto-updating. He previewed Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), where Microsoft would enable “the firewall by default. It’s got changes in Outlook Express and IE for safer e-mails and browsing. It uses some of the new hardware features in the newer chips to block a large class of exploits. It changes the way we do some of the code protection. We recompile a lot of the key modules. That goes into beta later this year.”

On and on he went, as the crowd grew restless. Office 2003. Hardware improvements to both CPUs and graphics. Itanium, bringing 64-bit computing. The security chipsets that would enable Next Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB. Broadband penetration. Advanced web services. He even uttered the phrase “Windows .NET,” a branding his firm had long since given up on.

And then finally, mercifully, he finally launched into what Microsoft was doing with Longhorn.

“This is going to be a very big release,” he said, “the biggest release of this decade, the biggest since Windows 95 … It’s an advance for customers, being able to connect up, being able to have your information appear on all your different devices; having that information structured without you doing a lot of work; having fewer commands despite the new richness that’s there, and using capabilities around the agent to take and put you in control, so that understanding your privacy and what mail is coming into you. You feel like you have a few simple things you do that put you back in the driver’s seat there, so you have confidence and control. For developers, we want to take the things that people have had to duplicate and bring those into the platform so you can focus on other capabilities. So faster developments are driven by the major new sub-systems.”

Longhorn consisted of four primary subsystems, he said: Fundamentals, the Avalon presentation system, WinFS unified storage—a “holy grail” for him—and Indigo, a communications layer.

And then things got really exciting.

“We want to give you a quick glimpse of some of these things and how they come together, and so I want to invite the person who is really driving the user interface to come together to give you a look,” Gates said. “So let me ask Hillel Cooperman to come up and give you a sense of what Longhorn is all about. Good morning, Hillel.”

“Do you want to see “Longhorn?” Cooperman asked to cheers. He started off with what would become the Welcome screen, and then he logged into the Longhorn desktop and opened a window. “See how that comes in?” he asked of the brilliantly transparent window.

“A couple of things going on here. First, there’s a new look. And, as excited as we are about that, and we hope you think it’s exciting and beautiful and professional, but it’s still early. The most exciting part is that making a new look is relatively easy. Building this deep into the platform as part of the platform that you get to take advantage of, that’s tough, and that’s what we have been working on.”

“So, if you notice, things like the transparency that we have here on the Windows— watch as I move this kind of under this guy on the side—you can see it in the background there. Let me open up a couple more windows. Watch how these actually animate onto the screen. And this is using things that are part of ‘Avalon,’ just like Bill talked about—including things like pixel shaders, the desktop composition—all this advanced graphics functionality that to date has been typically the domain of game developers, now available to actually render you either on the desktop and, of course, in your applications.”

“And just in case anyone is thinking that maybe this is some kind of prototype or something, let’s run a classic application. Anyone remember VisiCalc? There it is. It’s 20 years of commitment to compatibility. And now we are going to see if we have 20 years of commitment to usability, because I am going to figure out how to quit this thing — forward-slash, S, Q, Y — oh, yeah, there we go.”

The crowd couldn’t stop applauding.

“All right, so let’s take a quick look at the desktop,” he continued. “And before we move on to some of the big pillars that Bill talked about, I want to talk to you guys about that guy on the side there. It looks pretty prominent, so we should address it. Right now we’re calling it the Sidebar. We’ll figure out what the final name is at some point. But what’s interesting about this is a couple of things.”

“First, it is actually built with these common parts that show information, notification, services, that a user might really be interested in seeing when they’re working on their main application, without popping up a window that covers it. For example, the time, their buddy list, or a slide show. Of course, you can add and remove these tiles here, or even an RSS feed built right into the sidebar … The best part about this is not that we have this functionality built into Windows. The best part, like everything I’m going to show you today, is that this is part of the platform. This is part of the SDK that you guys are going to get, you guys can write to it, and we think you can do great, great things with this.”

“All right, so let’s dive into some of the things Bill talked about.  Let me open up this documents window.  Now, in some ways this is a pretty straightforward screen.  This is essentially the evolution of my document, but a couple of things are different.  First of all, we are showing almost 1,100 items in this view, which, frankly, given today’s experience, it would be a little not useful.  And, in fact, these items are not sitting in one folder.  They’re located across the system.  And this view is actually a dynamic view that is generated for you right in the system, and of course available as part of the platform.”

According to Cooperman, WinFS would provide built-in search capabilities to Longhorn, providing “self-organization,” filtering, and other advanced capabilities. The UI would use a new interface called a stack to display content from different physical locations in a single view, and the stacks would be visually sized based on how much content they contained. “Because they are not physical locations, one item can show up in more than one stack,” he said of these dynamic views.

After a more technical discussion of WinFS, Hillel wandered into Longhorn’s communication history, which would display “all the faxes, all the files that Bill shared with me, all the notifications or e-mails.” Longhorn would also feature peer-to-peer sharing features, he said.

“There are several thousand developers up in Redmond watching us live right now, thrilled that we finally get to show you some of our early work and very excited to hear your feedback,” he said, heading into his conclusion. “We’re using this ourselves.  We’re building the next generation of Windows on top of this great technology. And we’re thrilled to see what you’re going to do with it.  There’s a lot more great stuff coming up.”

Applause exploded yet again as Gates took the stage again. “It’s fun to see ‘Longhorn’ coming together,” he said, smiling.

Try to imagine, if you can, the thrill of this moment. Sitting in a roaring crowd of developers, eager to sop up whatever Longhorn goodness Microsoft felt benevolent enough to bestow upon us. We were transfixed. It was one of the most impressive technical presentations I’ve ever seen, and the only Microsoft event that has ever approached the blind faith of a Steve Jobs keynote.

And the keynote was only beginning. Next up, Jim Allchin would take us on a more technical dive into the Longhorn application development features to come. And we’d finally get our first look at Longhorn application source code.

More soon.