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Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

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Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#51

Post by Maakuth »

StevePerkins wrote: post #22
unsignedqword wrote: post #8

Vista was not a very well-received release, but I remember using 64-bit Vista way back when. Maybe my memory is failing me a little, but I don't really recall Vista being that bad or unstable. UAC, of course, was a little annoying then, but 7 felt a little more unstable and crash-prone than Vista. My dad still uses a Vista desktop regularly (a 2007 install) and as far as I can tell it still works perfectly fine for h…

Aside from UAC... the biggest issue with Vista is that the required system resources was a significant jump over XP, and too many manufacturers shipped machines that were simply too under-powered for the preinstalled OS. In those days, I remember seeing Vista laptops with 1 GB of RAM, on which Vista was unusable. People had to edit arcane registry settings to disable the "Aero" look-and-feel, and drop down to a more…

IIRC among other pressures, Intel pushed Microsoft to consider one of their weaker GPUs Aero compatible. That allowed many PC OEMs to ship Vista PCs with very underpowered GPUs.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#53

Post by executesorder66 »

forgettableuser wrote: post #48
untog wrote: post #5

This is really fascinating, though I have no idea why. That said, I'd love to read a series of articles about the development of Longhorn and why it failed rather than a tech dive into the components developed. Does anyone have any recommendations?

There was a in-depth article from Vanity Fair from 2012, "Microsoft’s Lost Decade" which tries to put together what happened. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lo... Some excerpts: By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse a…

>no more using C#

So what did they use instead? C++ ?

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#54

Post by yuhong »

Maakuth wrote: post #51
StevePerkins wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from UAC... the biggest issue with Vista is that the required system resources was a significant jump over XP, and too many manufacturers shipped machines that were simply too under-powered for the preinstalled OS. In those days, I remember seeing Vista laptops with 1 GB of RAM, on which Vista was unusable. People had to edit arcane registry settings to disable the "Aero" look-and-feel, and drop down to a more…

IIRC among other pressures, Intel pushed Microsoft to consider one of their weaker GPUs Aero compatible. That allowed many PC OEMs to ship Vista PCs with very underpowered GPUs.

The weakest Intel GPU that can support Aero was the Intel 945G. There is also the 915G that don't have a WDDM driver, which is even more of a problem now given that they ditched XPDM support in Win8.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#55

Post by pjmlp »

untog wrote: post #5

This is really fascinating, though I have no idea why. That said, I'd love to read a series of articles about the development of Longhorn and why it failed rather than a tech dive into the components developed. Does anyone have any recommendations?

From all the MSDN sites I follow, and other sources I would say politics.

During those days the Windows division was the one running the OS, C and C++ compilers, while .NET belonged to DevTools division.

So if .NET ever became a success implementing Longhorn, it would mean the Windows division would loose internal power, so many things failed, because instead of improving the languages or runtimes, people would rather see all implode.

So can see how this played by what happened following Longhorn's demise.

Many of the Win32 APIs that should have been .NET code, had been turned into COM APIs. Actually since Vista the majority of new APIs are all COM based (WinRT is also COM).

The Hilo C++ example of the new way of coding with COM for desktop applications was made available.

And the whole "going native" message started coming out of MSDN blogs and there was even a few Going Native conferences before Microsoft merged them CppCon.

The Visual C++ team was ramped up again, as they had moved most of the people out back in the "we are going .NET" days.

The WP 7 with its .NET/JIT model was shown the door.

The COM+ Runtime, which was the genesis of .NET before Microsoft decided to create the CLR instead, was brought back to life but with .NET metadata instead of COM type libraries.

.NET got the Singularity compiler retargeted for Windows Phone 8, with AOT compilation to native code taking place at the Windows store. The MDIL format is native code that just lacks linking, which is done at install time on the WP 8.x devices.

With the going native wind still kind of going strong and Midori ramping down, Project N eventually became what is nowadays known as .NET Native.

So if you look at UWP stack, either .NET or C++/CX, Longhorn is here just based on COM instead of CLR.

I don't know if I am wrong or right, but this is how I read everything that happened, having Windows developer experience since the Windows 3.0 days.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#56

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cyanbane wrote: post #36

Could this be one of the most expensive software development failures of all time? Is MS putting money on top of that to show how much of a failure it was and how they decided to deal with it? At a minimum, just letting the story be told from the grave to allow for people to look out for similar things in other projects? Interesting I think. I don't know of many companies who allow/support documentation of a failure…

> Could this be one of the most expensive software development failures of all time?

It's probably going to be a while before anything beats the F-35 on that count.

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#57

Post by cpeterso »

Else where on the longhorn.ms website are PDFs from some Microsoft internal emails from 2001–2002 that are interesting reads in their own right:

"Notes and Next Steps from Windows Client Business Plan Review": http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX06977.pdf

"FW: Longhorn search": http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX08378.pdf

Steven Sinofsky: http://longhorn.ms/wp-content/uploads/PX07069.pdf

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#59

Post by chungy »

saganus wrote: post #45

How come they can distribute binaries of an OS that belongs to a company? I mean, even though it is a failed project, it still may have valuable stuff, patents, etc. So how come they are able to distribute without issues? are they going to potentially get a C&D? should we start archiving these just in case?

There's a few possible answers: * Microsoft doesn't know about it * Microsoft doesn't care about it * The website has ignored C&Ds * [insert other reasons]

I'm actually most inclined to think "Doesn't care" is the correct answer. None of these builds are under support and it's unlikely that your necessary drivers or apps will run on it. They're alpha and beta builds of Windows Vista, for crying out loud -- even the full release is getting long in the tooth (and programs like Chrome and Firefox are dropping support).

Re: Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

#60

Post by carlesfe »

cpeterso wrote: post #52

I have some screenshots from 1998 of Microsoft's "Neptune" project, a prototype of a task-based GUI to replace the Windows 95-style GUI. I keep meaning to publish these screenshots online for historical reference..

Well now I'm curious, please upload them to imgur :)
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