Re: Longhorn Features?

Firstly thanks for all the amazing info you provided.

Last year at their Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced that Longhorn would include three technology pillars - "Avalon", "Indigo" and "WinFS".

For sometime they had been talking about releasing the "Indigo" set of API's as an add-on to the .NET framework.

There are pro's and con's to this...

blah blah ( :) )

What do you feel about the announcement? You think it's a major advantage for the Linux dudes?


I see the entire Longhorn issue in a different way. Its more of Win vs Win. What I mean to say is that considering all the MAJOR changes in the OS, will the industry accept. I rather think they'll take a wait and watch approach. Especially on the server-side. Btw is Longhorn going to be for the desktop or server? So adoption of a very new technology will be slightly slow. How fast did industry accept the Win NT platform? Is .NET being readily accepted? as a stable platform? I am asking questions here and not being cynical. Thats a reason why I believe an incremental update to the OS is a much better approach.

Will Linux gain in what I feel might be a sluggish initial period? I am not sure. Linux vs Windows will continue to be decided on different factors. Servers do not need the Longhorn features. Same for most co's running word processing apps. So who knows.

The same argument applies to the new Java 5.0 version. There are many new features so when will the industry adopt? We as dev's get excited with new tech. What is the status of Web Services? How many co's use them? (Again a question). I do not think Web Services have been adopted widely enough.

Whats Yukon and the other future stuff?? I read some article somwhere which basically confused all the relationship between the file-system, the database etc!! Whats supposed to do what? And like Mohn (assuming Mohn and I are not the only ones reading codeword anymore!!) mentioned the base FS is something else. So any idea about all the layers?

Other points Mohn raised was the size of the .NET framework and version problems.

The Java runtime Environment is 10Mb+ and the SDK is 30Mb+. Both platforms are mini-OS'es in a way. After Longhorn, .NET might become super huge!! Un-Downloadable !! Java also has so many extensions now (javax) which are pretty huge in size. So thats going to be a bigger problem for Java as MS will bundle .NET in the OS.

On incompatibility between versions there are differences again. In Java, all versions are backward compatible. Even though a section maybe deprecated (say 1.1), even the never versions have to support it. In other words what is marked as deprecated is never removed. This was one promise by SUN to their customers, that Java will always be backward compatible. This is not what the dev's like too much. Obviously this bloats the API and its not "clean" anymore. Having said hat the .NET scene seems more worse? What versioning system is followed in .NET? Any minor/major system? I always get the feeling that .NET is in a sort of a test phase. Maybe after Longhorn, the API will be fixed to atleast some scheme.