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Inside Longhorn: The Details (Continued)

Unified Data: WinFS
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has long spoken of a unified data store in Windows. The problem today is that each application has its own islands of data that are largely locked within that application. For example, I have contacts scattered around my machine in Outlook, Quicken, a random Access database or two, and in various small utility programs I use. Occasionally, one application can read another's data, but most often it is only to import the data so that I have duplicate sets of data that are never again in sync. Worse, relationships between data are buried in the applications that own the data. In the file system, the shell views in Windows Explorer are tied to a folder hierarchy that makes it hard to work with various data in their best form. For example, you can have video, photo, and Excel workbooks in a single directory but unless you do a search you can't view a list of all the Excel workbooks on your system. And a thumbnail view is great for photos but worthless for workbooks. The situation begs for a higher abstraction of data with the ability to preserve relationships while tagging data with identifying properties.

WinFS is a new set of Longhorn services that provides a flexible data store that is managed by Windows. Using new controls and framework interfaces, you can hook into those data stores and share data between applications. It uses a set of extensible XML schemas that provide logical views into the data, no matter where it exists on a system. It provides programmatic access and synchronization services to move around data in consistent ways. You can even set up information agents to, for example, notify you when data changes.

Probably most intriguing about WinFS is how you can add attributes to data so that you can use it with different apps, search it, and view it logically or virtually any way you'd like. It supports object-based, SQL, and XML interfaces, using a data model built on NTFS streams.

The most surprising thing about the keynote was that even with all the talk about data, it centered completely on WinFS. The only mention of Yukon was a vague architectural slide in Gates's deck. Yukon was supposed to be the big thing at this PDC, but it didn't make the cut in day one of the show.

Communicating with Indigo
The third major focus in Longhorn is communication, and the presentation focused completely on Web services. Microsoft intends to build these XML-based formats and protocols directly into Windows, saving us from the barrage of toolkits and VS.NET add-ons that we've suffered through over the last few years.

But these aren't your grandmother's Web services. Now that Web Services Enhancements (WSE) have become reality, Longhorn will support secure communications with most or all of the support that reliable business communications require. You'll be able to wrap exchanges in transactions and protect data from prying eyes and random corruption with digital signatures and other technologies. Viewing the demos in today's keynotes evoked images of the computer as central command, managing your every communication with the world, including messaging and collaboration of all forms. Jim Allchin, Group Vice President of the Microsoft Platforms Group, spoke of managing presence—how an application responds when a person is online. The implication is that Longhorn apps will go far beyond today's instant messenger capabilities where at most you can get a notification when someone comes online.

Indigo uses a port and channel metaphor to let you hook into Longhorn's communication services. You'll feel right at home if you've done any sockets-type programming in .NET, except that the objects in Indigo are far more flexible, more highly abstracted away from the various underlying protocols, and more intelligent.

Supercomputer Required for Admission?
The graphics features of Longhorn require enormous computing power to make them appear smooth to the user, so the OS makes heavy use of the GPU—graphics processing units—that are lightly used in today's apps outside of games and other graphics-intense apps. Longhorn users will have a much better experience with beefier hardware. Windows is once again leaving in the dust many of the machines typical users are buying today.

Longhorn is going to usher in a brave new world of Windows development, along with a near-nightmare of compatibility. Microsoft is emphatically committed to making existing Win32 apps run on Longhorn. But you'll have a hard time writing new applications that use Longhorn features when running on Longhorn, but degrade gracefully when running on older versions of Windows. Many software companies will be faced with maintaining parallel code bases with no clear upgrade path from Win32 versions to WinFX versions. I hope that Microsoft provides tools and strategies when Longhorn is released to move those applications forward in sensible ways.

When can we expect Longhorn will appear on computers near you? Microsoft isn't saying, but Jim Allchin did say the company is shooting for a beta 1 release in the first half of 2004. That means it's a safe bet that we'll see a final release in 2005 or later.

An important point to keep in mind: The bits released at PDC (and available soon to MSDN subscribers) is alpha software. That's pre-beta, so it is unstable, has entire feature sets that aren't implemented, and has features implemented that will likely change radically before the first real beta. But as an indicator of the directions of Windows computing and development, there is a lot to get excited about. Microsoft has once again set some ambitious goals for itself. Time will tell how successful it is.

About the Author
Don Kiely, MCSD, MCP, MDE, is a senior technology consultant. When he isn't writing software, he's writing about it, speaking about it at conferences, or training developers in it. Reach him at .