Throwback to the supposed Windows XP successor

Codenamed Longhorn, it was Microsoft's most ambitious operating-system development effort in over a decade, entailing both an extensive redesign and a major overhaul of the application programming interface (API), the underlying set of services the OS provides to programmes. Despite the significant changes, though, Longhorn was far from a complete rewrite; it built on the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 code bases as well as the .NET framework − Microsoft claimed that maintaining compatibility with existing applications was a priority.

 

As evidence of this commitment, the 2003 Professional Developers' Conference − Microsoft's annual confab for third-party Windows developers − included a demonstration of Longhorn running VisiCalc, the classic DOS-based spreadsheet application from 1981.

 

Longhorn's goals were numerous: make Windows more productive and engaging, improve security and reliability, and provide support for a new generation of rich, media-aware applications. That was just to name a few. To get a taste of what Longhorn had to offer, a sample team of professionals installed and worked with build 4074, which was released at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in the following year's spring. Microsoft developers had also been quizzed to unveil some of the inside track on what's still to come.

 

While it was too early to pass judgment on Longhorn, which wasn't expected to ship until 2006 or 2007, the users were hopeful about the direction Microsoft was taking with its new OS. The new 3D user interface was thought to be useful and fun. Users were optimistic about the prospects of the WinFS file system, an ambitious and appealing effort to better organise, categorize, and expose the masses of material on modern hard drives. (And it was hoped that Microsoft had learned from its missteps with the object file system in the Cairo project and its other efforts to recast the file system.) It was expected that developers would appreciate the steps Microsoft was taking to simplify the Windows programming model and to make it easier to write graphically rich applications.

 

Perhaps most of all, weary of combating exploits and applying hotfixes, we were looking forward to the increased security and reliability that Longhorn aimed to offer from day one.