WinFX: Now Better than Ever
By now you have heard the news: WinFX will be shipping on XP, WS03 in order to make both Longhorn and WinFX ship with higher quality and sooner. If you haven’t already, check out JimAll’s Channel9 interview. Longhorn will contain core-OS level features focusing on the basics: security, reliability, manageability and performance (and cool new look-and-feel feaures). While WinFX will be shipped with Longhorn and available for XP SP2 and WS03 in order to expose the developer platform to a broader reach. Of course Longhorn will ship the .NET Framework 2.0 (Whidbey) redist and WinFX, but there will not be lots of interdependencies dependencies between WinFX and Longhorn. Along those lines, WinFS, the storage engine for Windows, will not be on this train. It will likely be in beta when LH RTMs.
At PDC2003 Jim Allchin announced WinFX. At the time he made a passing comment that really stuck with me. I imagine that most folks missed it or quickly forgot it. But he clearly said that this is an unprecedented early-look at a major OS release and that some of what you are hearing today will NOT make it into the final product. Turns out he knew what he was talking about (a bazillion years shipping Windows releases will do that for you I guess ;-)). While it is true that some of what we talked about at that PDC will not make it into the LH product, I still strongly believe in the vision we laid out and the company is still executing on that vision, it is just going to take us a couple of hops to get all the way there.
I think this is a great move for a couple of reasons:
1. Reach. We are now able to bring the greatness of WinFX to a much broader set of customers, making WinFX an even more compelling development platform.
2. Timing. This plan optimizes for shipping sooner. And that is goodness for the entire ecosystem. There is really only one way to make a software project ship sooner: Simplify. And simplify is what we did with Longhorn and WinFX. We simplified the features, simplified the dependencies, we simplified the product. As an aside, adding resources rarely makes the project more simple and therefore often does not help you ship sooner.
As far as the stuff I deal with on a day-to-day biases things will get a lot easier for me. We have a more scoped set of APIs in WinFX so I can focus better on cleaning those APIs up and making them shine.
What do you think? Good move or not?
If you had $100 to spend today on everything you ever heard would be in “WinFX” or “Longhorn” where would you spend it? This is exactly the question we are asking internally now as we crisp up our definition of WinFX over the next few months. Your feedback would be very valuable.
Comments
Anonymous
August 29, 2004
"What do you think? Good move or not?"
I see both good and bad in it.
Good: For the many people who have XP now, this is great news. I think it is great that more and more .Net technologies will be availble to many.
Bad: However, if Avalon, Indigo, and WinFX are going to be available for XP, then what reason is there to consider upgrading to Longhorn? I think that Microsoft is hurting their future OS potential. While it is early, I think that Microsoft needs to clarify what Longhorn will offer over the enhanced XP of 2006.Anonymous
August 29, 2004
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August 29, 2004
I would assign the $50 to track down the individuals who over-promised features and hid the real risks from management to give them to boot. And the remaining $50 would go towards cloning Raymond Chen.Anonymous
August 29, 2004
Anyone knowns if MSH (Microsoft Shell, Monad) will be also available for WinXP and Win2003?
Slavo.Anonymous
August 29, 2004
This is pretty much what we've understood the situation to be with Indigo for some time.
As far as Avalon goes, I don't think having it available for XP will hurt Longhorn sales at all: to get the full experience you will most likely need new hardware, and new machines will ship with Longhorn...plus I wouldn't be surprised if even aside from the hardware the optimal experience is affected by cored OS-level features. In addition, the broad availability of Avalon provides a much greater incentive for developers to er, develop for it - and for designers to start targetting XAML (presumably using nice friendly IDE's to do so). This will actually accelerate a process I've been expecting ever since the PDC, namely the evolution of today's web designers into more generalised UI designers.
The WinFS news is the disappointing one of course (well, that and Indigo not being available before Longhorn). I hope it's not too far in the future, and that I get to use it while I still have some hair.Anonymous
August 29, 2004
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August 29, 2004
I'd spend the $100 making sure you get the shared GPU driver model into WinFX on XP and Windows 2003. I know you need something to sell Longhorn but if WinFX on XP is a subset of the full WinFX no one is going to write apps that take advantage of the full Longhorn feature set.Anonymous
August 29, 2004
Tom asks when we are going to ship WinFX…. Our goal is to ship it with Longhorn, so we are targeting locking down a few months before LH RTM and shipping on the same day.
Tom also asks about X64 – While I still haven’t got my x64 machine on my desktop yet ;-), we are still targeting x64 to ship at the same time as x86. BTW, Whidbey will support X64 even sooner!Anonymous
August 30, 2004
Ok, I am going around preaching this on every blog, I think: PLEASE call it .Net 3.0! Drop the WinFX name. ONCE show sanity with your naming. Remember "ActiveX"? Right...
WinFX made a lot of sense to differentiate the stuff that was only available on Longhorn and not on downlevel operating systems. But now, it would really make things so much more logical and cause a lot less confusion if Avalon and Indigo would just be packed together with the Framework as .Net 3.
Please :)Anonymous
August 30, 2004
Yeah, "WinFX" is pretty terrible, let's hope its a placeholder like "Longhorn". "ActiveX" was a disaster, I still field questions from people asking how ActiveX differers from COM differs from OLE. On the other hand Microsoft does need something to bridge Win 32 / Win 64, especially as we transition from one to the other. It's hard to come up with names that don't upset someone, what about WinNG? (Next Generation), or WinPK (Penguin Killer). Only serious.
Getting back to WinFX and downstream platforms, can we expect the first WinFX 'XP/2K3 SDK beta along with the Longhorn beta 1? Will Visual Studio Orca fully support WinFX on 'XP etc, in particular will all the designers and life cycle tools support downstream platforms for WinFX?Anonymous
August 30, 2004
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August 30, 2004
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August 30, 2004
Since it comes up a bit:
What's the document that most accurately describes exactly what WinFX is? What API's are included?
Is it by definition whatever .NET framework ships as part of Longhorn?
It seems harder to get people excited about something that has such a shifty meaning - Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS are all very clear in at least what their intentions are, even for developers not clear on the actual API. WinFX seems to have no semantic associated with it "in the wild" at the moment AFAICT.Anonymous
August 30, 2004
"What do you think? Good move or not? "
We lose WinFS in return for a nearer ship date and an API that will work on XP? Good move, hands down.Anonymous
August 31, 2004
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September 01, 2004
To Slavo Furman: the information I got from WinHEC 2004 was that Monad will be supported on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and subsequent versions of Windows.
To BradA: FWIW, I agree with David... rename WinFX to .NET 3.0.Anonymous
September 02, 2004
On the WinFX rename issue: I'm not sure that .NET 3.0 is such a good choice, since WinFX is a much larger slice of the API pie than previous .NET incarnations, so calling it .NET 3.0 might suggest a more incremental change than is actually involved.
On the other hand, WinFX as a name stinks big time, if only because it sounds too much like WinFS (making phone conversations on the subject next to impossible).
"FX" doesn't scream ".NET" to most people as it apparently does to Microsoft staff.
On the other hand I can't think of any decent acronyms (for example, "MAW" anybody? ("Managed API for Windows") ...And Lo, I Have Plumbed The Depths Of Lameness).Anonymous
September 02, 2004
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May 02, 2005
Last year, Chris Sells wrote a series of articles in which he set out to rewrite Solitaire using Avalon. ...Anonymous
September 07, 2005
Last year, Chris Sells wrote a series of articles in which he set out to rewrite Solitaire using Avalon. ...Anonymous
July 15, 2006
Brad Abrams : WinFX: Now Better than Ever.
The comment is from “David” who states”...Anonymous
May 29, 2009
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June 15, 2009
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June 18, 2009
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