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January 6, 2004
Microsoft's description of the main components of Longhorn
From one of their MSDN articles
It is important to understand the capabilities of three key innovations in "Longhorn"—Presentation, Data, and Communications—and then work to determine how an application can take advantage of them. By analyzing an application from these three perspectives, one can best understand how an application can benefit from the new features of "Longhorn." Consider the following questions with regard to a given application:
Presentation. How is the user interface currently rendered? Can users navigate this user interface adroitly? Is the interface pleasant to interact with? Is data visualized in a way that is tangible to the user? Would it be appropriate to provide different skins on the user interface for different audiences?
Data. How is data from the application stored on the local PC? How does the application expose metadata to other applications and to the operating system about files it has encountered? How easily can users search for this data?
Communications. How does the application communicate to the server? Are there security or reliability enhancements that could be made to this communication pattern? Can the application work offline? Are there third-party services or services that could benefit the application?
The following three sections ("Avalon," "WinFS," and "Indigo") provide a brief summary of the innovations in these areas. Again, further information about the capabilities in "Longhorn" is available in the "Longhorn" SDK documentation.
Avalon (Presentation)
"Avalon" is the code name for the presentation and media technologies in "Longhorn." "Avalon" represents a significant evolution of presentation technology, with the goal of allowing developers to easily build rich and compelling user interfaces that can seamlessly integrate high-quality document and multimedia content.
The presentation technologies in "Longhorn" enable developers to deliver an exciting and compelling user experience by providing a full set of the prepackaged UI components, multimedia support, and smooth integration of applications into the user interface. "Avalon" is designed to take advantage of the capabilities of local hardware, so that all applications use the power of the graphics processing unit, rendering high quality, next generation user interfaces.
WinFS (Data)
"WinFS" is the code name for the new file system that provides data and storage model for "Longhorn." "WinFS" simplifies the process of finding and storing important user data. In addition to streamlined APIs for accessing relational data, "WinFS" introduces a new centralized storage subsystem and API for storing and searching documents and contacts.
By defining common schemas and a centralized API for metadata access, "WinFS" enables different applications to access each other's data in a previously unrealizable way. Metadata, including categorization and linking across items, can be added to any object in the file system, allowing for more powerful search and organization functionality.
This new storage system builds an everyday information schema describing the items stored in the computer and allows users to organize and relate items based upon attributes represented in the schema. The schema describes entities such as images, documents, people, events, tasks, and messages. These entities are combined in meaningful ways through relationships. For example, a document and person may be related through an authoring relationship.
By using the schema and attributes present in items and relationships, a user can pose questions to the system to locate information rather than trying to search various folders as they do today.
Indigo (Communications)
"Indigo" is a set of technologies for developing connected applications on the Windows platform. It provides a complete and flexible messaging platform for building connected applications independent of network topology. It is based on broadly-adopted XML Web services protocols, thus fostering interoperability with other XML Web services platforms.
Developers can write applications on a simple yet powerful programming framework to use these communication features that exchange information across clients, services, and devices.
Summary
"Longhorn" is an important release for Microsoft that lays down a solid foundation for building the next generation of applications. It features WinFX, a set of managed APIs for developing this new type of smart, connected applications. WinFX provides advances in presentation, storage, and communications that enhance the writing of these applications. Existing applications will be able to take incremental advantage of the new capabilities in "Longhorn" through a range of different approaches depending on the scenario and feature.
Posted by Martin at January 6, 2004 1:52 PM
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