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Microsoft's Platform Strategies for 2006 and Beyond
Longhorn represents both the culmination of the .NET vision and a dramatically improved foundation for future products.
by Peter O'Kelly

Posted July 12, 2004

This is the fourth and final Trends & Analysis column in a series focused on the past, present, and future of Microsoft's platform strategies. The first column, "Understanding Microsoft's Platform Strategies," established a framework for evaluating Microsoft's product line in terms of platforms, tools, applications, and services. The second column, "Microsoft's Platform Strategies Today" described how .NET has matured during the past two years. The third column, "Microsoft's Platform Strategies for 2004-2005," addressed .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005. This column focuses on Longhorn, Microsoft's biggest and most strategically significant undertaking to date.

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) during October 2003 was a massive conceptual overload for most attendees. The detailed introductions to .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005 at PDC 2003 would have been more than sufficient to fill the event agenda, but Microsoft also used PDC 2003 as the venue to introduce Longhorn.

Longhorn, starting with a new Windows client planned for 2006 and a new Windows Server planned for 2007, is critically important to Microsoft's future. Although Microsoft can and will selectively position Longhorn as an incremental improvement to Windows XP in order to minimize upgrade-blocking disruption for enterprise migration, Longhorn will be the most sweeping update since Windows was originally introduced in June 1983 (Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985). More broadly, in terms of Microsoft's overall product line, Longhorn represents both the culmination of the .NET vision and a new, dramatically improved foundation for future Microsoft products.

From a developer's perspective, Longhorn represents the full .NET-ification of the Windows platform. It includes four key areas. All of the areas are presented to developers through WinFX, a new, unified, and radically simplified Windows API that's based entirely on managed code. The four areas include:

• Presentation: Avalon is the code name for the Longhorn presentation subsystem, a complete upgrade for the traditional Windows presentation stack. While Windows Forms, Web Forms, and traditional browser-based applications will still run on Avalon, Microsoft believes HTML has peaked in terms of its functional evolution. Avalon is Microsoft's attempt to unify the best of Windows and Web Forms into a single architectural model.
• Data: WinFS is the code name for a new data management subsystem that complements the widely deployed Windows NT File System (NTFS) with richer, schematized, automatically synchronized, and agent-oriented services.
• Communications: Indigo is the code name for an entirely new Microsoft implementation of the WS-* stack of Web services standards (WS-* is shorthand for the myriad standards initiatives designed to facilitate secure, reliable, and transacted Web services).
• Fundamentals: Longhorn's WinFX API also encapsulates lower-level operating system services in an expanded .NET Framework, with fundamentals focused on security, manageability, and deployment.

Security is also a key focus for Longhorn. In addition to incorporating the security benefits of moving to a comprehensive managed code API model for Windows, Longhorn will be the delivery vehicle for version 1 of Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), a controversial new security architecture that includes both specialized hardware and software (although it's likely some versions of Longhorn will not include NGSCB). Some of the threats Microsoft intends to mitigate with NGSCB include data tampering, information disclosure, repudiation, and identity spoofing.