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Automate More and Manage Better With Longhorn and Yukon
Microsoft has provided a sneak peek at its Windows Longhorn edition and it is stoking expectations for SQL Server's Yukon edition.
by John Zipperer

Posted December 18, 2003

Faster, better, and safer might be the three best words to describe the promise of the next versions of Microsoft's Windows and SQL Server lines of products. Those three words aptly represent the changes and improvements the software giant is making to the latest releases of these core product offerings, popularly known by their respective code names, Longhorn and Yukon.

Those codenames might stir up images of cowboys in the old West living lives of independence and difficult work. But the products that carry those monikers represent a greater integration of enterprise systems, not greater independence; and, if Microsoft realizes the promise of the product previews in the final releases, the work should be less difficult.

Microsoft customers are already closely examining Yukon (see the sidebar, "Yukon Offers Business Intelligence for Everyone"). Microsoft gave developers an opportunity to begin investigating Longhorn at its recent Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. The company is tight-lipped about nondeveloper issues for the new Windows platform, but much of what the development community is exploring will have an impact on administration and end users. The most significant developments to watch include a new file system, known as WinFS, as well as improvements in manageability and security.

Build a Better File System
WinFS is Longhorn's cross between a file system and a low-level database. That description doesn't do it justice in the eyes of at least one expert. "I should admit I'm biased because I'm a database person, but at a high level, from what I've seen so far, I think [WinFS] is the most significant new capability in Longhorn," says Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst with The Burton Group. "Certainly there are other things that are exciting, but if you look at it and say to what extent does Indigo [a new programming framework] or Avalon [a programming interface] represent a big step from the services that are there today, I think the leap that WinFS makes is far more significant."

WinFS will not replace the existing Windows storage system; they will coexist. Ed Kaim, a Microsoft product manager, tells WSS Magazine that WinFS is intended to be an item store in which a lot of data lives inside Longhorn. Developers will benefit by having a good local store to use as a custom database for certain applications. He uses Media Player as an example; today, if you use Media Player, it stores the information about music so you can slice it based on authors or track numbers or the albums from which the tracks came. It can be complicated to do a search across that file system. Microsoft's intent with WinFS is to provide the infrastructure for developers to use so they don't have to write it for themselves.

As another example, he says that if you have a meeting in Outlook, it has information on people, location, and date; today, if developers wanted to access that, they would have to play with the data to get it to look the way they want. "With WinFS, they'll get out-of-the-box a concept of a meeting that has reference to these Longhorn-based objects of a person or a location or whatever," says Kaim. If an application knows what a purchase order looks like and other people in the company are building applications that also use purchase orders, the user "can design a purchase order based on this schema; we can communicate and we don't have to do the serialization of these objects, and they can live in the operating system," says Kaim.

Those changes will give developers something to digest, so giving them the preview at PDC was sensible. "This is coming, it's big, it's challenging, so they've got to give developers ample lead time," says O'Kelly. He says developers will have a lot less work do to if they are willing to rely on the service layers within WinFS. "You can work with your preferred abstraction," he says, "so if you like SQL or you like objects, you have one substrate that can manage all of it."

O'Kelly predicts that WinFS will give developers a lot to do—some of them overlapping with what Microsoft is doing, others doing separate things. (Even end users will find the WinFS that Microsoft demonstrated at PDC to have significant benefits, such as an Explorer that gives more-generalized views or many-many relationships.) Though WinFS is complementary to the underlying Windows file system, some third-party vendors might have to make adjustments to their products. "If Microsoft is able to have a unified and synchronized store that includes all of your personal messages and data files, that will shift the distribution of work between Windows and previously complementary systems such as Lotus Notes or iFolder," says O'Kelly.