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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

#91

Post by frik »

WalterGR wrote: post #84
cm3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And from what I understand ReFS is also implemented on top of NTFS, but this time it's real, shipped code and meant to provide some of the features found in ZFS to Windows users.

this time it's real, shipped code WinFS was real. Before the project was cancelled, we released a beta and a "beta refresh" - both installable on XP. (Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team.)

Can you tell us more about the "Live Journal" demo app? It looked like a killer app back then.

Video (watch at 14:55): https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/scobleizer/Shishir-Mehrotra-...

I tested WinFS beta2 on a high end WinXP PC (back then), WinFS beta was slow and the cool "Live Journal" demo app wasn't included.

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

#93

Post by rbanffy »

frik wrote: post #47
Numberwang wrote: post #2

I wonder if the project name for win10 was shoehorn.

Yes. Vista was actually a fine release, just a bit resource intensive, had a stubborn file copying algorithms, and device driver support from third parties weren't that great at release time. Beside that Win7 is after all a Vista SP1"+", and a damn fine OS until 2020. The worst Win OS was WinME, which was pretty unstable in comparison to older Win9x releases. I switched to Win2000 and then WinXP and never looked back…

> a damn fine OS until 2020

Can it delete an open file?

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

#94

Post by yuhong »

rasz_pl wrote: post #62
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…

OS/2 was couple of billion dollars.

The Microsoft part of the OS/2 2.0 fiasco is so bad and unethical it is one of my favorite topics (I'd say it is even worse than Longhorn).

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

#95

Post by tostitos1979 »

I'm curious if the Microsoft of today has learned its lesson and changed its ways? As an outsider now, I see lots of positive things going on such as acceptance of other platforms (especially Linux), open source activity, etc. Is Microsoft a good place to work again for a hacker (who doesn't play politics)?

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

#96

Post by WorldMaker »

pjmlp wrote: post #55
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 rathe…

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

Admittedly without the lost "pillar" of WinFS. Although I suppose these days you could call Cortana a close cousin to some of the original WinFS goals, just from a "cloud-first" direction instead of a "device-first" approach.

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

#97

Post by jitix »

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…

Vista OEM installs were quite optimized. My Dell XPS laptop from 2008 used to run Vista very smoothly. However my friend installed Vista on a desktop with similar config but with AMD processor and the performance was pretty bad.

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

#98

Post by WorldMaker »

mjevans wrote: post #66
WalterGR wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WinFS sort of was replaced with Cloud Storage and all of the Websites that allow you to store files in the Cloud. How so? The point of WinFS was to store an object graph representing your data in a DB. It was more or less antithetical to files. (Disclaimer: I was on the WinFS team.)

'the cloud' is associated with tagging type metadata and searching descriptions; I think that's what is being referenced. The actual implementation of storing and searching also becomes someone else's problem. In a way it's just another slosh back and forth in the cycle of centralization and de-centralization of processing/storage.

Similarly the sloshing back and forth between predefined ontology/semantics and "deep learning". In a way, isn't Cortana attacking many of the WinFS problems from the opposite direction? Cloud first and "deep learning/AI" versus local first and "deep semantics".

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

#99

Post by cm3 »

ygra wrote: post #87
cm3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And from what I understand ReFS is also implemented on top of NTFS, but this time it's real, shipped code and meant to provide some of the features found in ZFS to Windows users.

ReFS provides the same filesystem APIs as NTFS, but the implementation does not depend on NTFS at all.

Can you point me to a source? I've read conflicting articles on it and frankly I found it odd that they supposedly would layer ZFS-like features on top of NTFS.

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

#100

Post by frik »

rbanffy wrote: post #93
frik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Vista was actually a fine release, just a bit resource intensive, had a stubborn file copying algorithms, and device driver support from third parties weren't that great at release time. Beside that Win7 is after all a Vista SP1"+", and a damn fine OS until 2020. The worst Win OS was WinME, which was pretty unstable in comparison to older Win9x releases. I switched to Win2000 and then WinXP and never looked back…

> a damn fine OS until 2020 Can it delete an open file?

Weird question. I don't know what you mean with "it".

As a user you can delete an open file, if you remove the file handle. A convenient way is the unlocker.exe tool.

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