Longhorn

End of a busy week

Blog Author — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 03:30:00 GMT

Well, that's it...TechReady1 is at an end, as with all conferences there were some high and low points (usual lows, level of content...length of sessions etc). The highs were pretty good though!
C# 3.0 is just looking amazing - you'll just love this stuff when you see it at the PDC; there have been some *sneaks* which may or may not be true and I guess there will be some controversy about some of the new stuff...but I just love it! Seeing Anders Hejlserg's presentation and Chalk Talk you can tell how excited he is about this stuff too...just get your butt to the PDC!
A lot of thought is going into the whole smart client / occasionally connected scenarios - this is going to be a big area for the future and some of the stuff that's planned is pretty cool (new Whitepapers on this stuff are due soonish...).
Some great keynotes - lots of stuff I can't talk about yet (it kills me to say that...working for Microsoft is a two-edged sword!) some great stuff coming in Vista and Office as well as some great stuff for Enterprise customers certainly looks like it's going to be an interesting year ahead! Oh, I have a video snippet of Jim Allchin playing guitar today...hope I grow up to be just like him ;-)

Well, I'm off to try and get a machine loaded up with C# 3.0,Vista Beta 1, VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon) and BizTalk 2006...wish me luck :-P (actually...pretty sure this is totally impossible right now...just in case you were wondering...)

Joel Spolsky on Microsoft and why Longhorn / WinFX could fail.

Blog Author — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 22:43:00 GMT

Basically, Joel covers a whole bunch of ground in this article, including issues like why it's not in Microsoft's best interest to support DHTML and advance Internet Explorer (which actually explains a WHOLE LOT!), and the basic problem around Windows - including why he thinks Avalon / Longhorn is a mistake...you really have to read it, as usual it's a measured approach and very thought provoking!
My opinion (as if you care :-)), it's tricky territory for Microsoft, as Joel points out, the Web is probably never going to be a big earner for Microsoft; desktop apps like Office etc require separate licenses (and these are now REALLY enforced) web applications typically don't.
One thing I do think is interesting is the development of rich WebUIs using tools like Flash (take a look at this for a brilliant example of what I mean) - click-once in Whidbey also seeks to exploit this model by allowing users to retain rich UIs whilst also ensuring (enforcing?) realtime updates from the web; I also think that pay-for-use software may just make a comeback...

Longhorn install on VMWare 4.0

Blog Author — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 22:24:00 GMT

Well, went very smoothly - just got the DL off of MSDN subs downloads, mounted the iso as a disk for VMWare, fired it up in "2003 Server" config - installed perfectly! Seems to be better connecting using Terminal Services (RDP) - installing Whidbey now - gotta say, VMWare just kills VirtualPC right now...the current VPC doesn't event pretend to be able to run Longhorn, VMWare is pretty seamless, can't wait to try 2004 now that MS will be 'enhancing' it...I realise there's too many of this type of post around at the moment, sorry for adding to the swarf!

UPDATE: Umm...may have spoken too soon, left for work with Whidbey just about installed, came back and my machine has 'Press a key to reboot' showing....over and over again...hmm...bit worrying! Oh, and the MSDN discs arrived today as well - no Yukon annoyingly!

UPDATE UPDATE: May not have been Longhorn's fault - looks like my main hard disk is on the point of failing (thanks to the SMART prompt when I rebooted) - seems like my bulk mail test (where I wrote 3 million files to disk and deleted them again) may have been a bit too much for the poor thing...