Riding Herd : Windows Vista

How I think about the Windows Vista platform

jmazner — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:50:00 GMT

There are a ton of new features in the Windows Vista platform (thousands of new APIs), some of which are accessible on Windows XP and Server 2003 via redistributable runtimes. Because of those runtimes, we often hear confusion from partners about how exactly we define the Windows Vista platform and how developer should think about it. Here’s a summary of the talking points I use to describe the Windows Vista platform. Because I wrote this to be shared broadly, it’s more formal and less conversational than a typical blog entry, but I hope you find it useful none the less.

My elevator pitch for how developers should think about the Windows Vista platform:

· Great user experience matters

o Faster, cheaper, better solutions for your users

· Deliver great UX faster with the Windows Vista platform

o Comprehensive platform for developers and designers

· Great UX runs best on Windows Vista

1) Great user experience matters:

When your customers are evaluating purchasing your app, their most likely looking for you to deliver value in one of three areas: productivity gains, reduced operational costs, or strategic new capabilities. So it’s trite but true that new solutions have to be faster, cheaper or better. Those kinds of improvements are driven by great user experience – not simply great user interface, but a focus on complete end to end experiences that help users deliver better results.

Faster

Great UX improves personal productivity – not just completing the same task in less time, but actually helping users make better decisions. Researcher Colin Ware has written that “the human visual system is a pattern seeker of enormous power and subtlety.” His research (examples here and here) shows that well-designed use of light, color, depth and motion can significantly increase the amount of information a user can visualize and process. Dell, for example, found that a new integrated call center application enabled sales representatives to sell more offerings per call while still reducing average call duration by 10 percent. The intuitive interface also “decreases the time it takes for new sales representatives to perform at levels that are comparable to their peers by 50 to 65 percent.” Apps that deliver great UX enable quicker data analysis, and optimize the process of sharing, collaborating and acting on information. The Scripps Research Institute’s Collaborative Molecular Environment is an example precisely such a user experience.

Cheaper

Great UX reduces training and operational costs. Intelligent use of network and services infrastructure increase application responsiveness and availability (including offline use, of course) while reducing network bandwidth. Well-integrated identity and security features reduce the need for VPN infrastructure. Advances like these make Windows apps more cost effective than web applications, and ClickOnce and WPF Express mitigate the historical deficit in ease of deployment and update between Windows and Web apps. As one example, a recent case study from a Monsanto .NET project showed productivity increasing “by 40 to 50 percent, equivalent to millions of dollars in annual cost savings.”

Better

For digital customer relationships, your online presence is the only face most of your customers will ever see. Servicing customers with novelty, speed, and simplicity creates an affinity that goes beyond graphics and logos. The convenience of UX that’s fully integrated with your customers’ desktop and peripherals promotes loyalty and use of your services. Check out the in-store kiosk that Fluid built for The North Face to get an idea of the potential here, or Lee Brimelow’s blog to see how a designer approaches the capabilities of the platform. The MyYahoo! demo we showed at Mix is another example worth looking over.

We think the technologies in the Windows Vista platform are particularly well suited to improving the following aspects of user experience:

*High fidelity UI*	Span form factors, input methods, and media types with seamless access to full client API
*Increased customer connection*	Provide more value, more of the time
*Connected Systems*	Fast and flexible integration via Service Orientation, WS-*, and workflow
*Smart Mobility*	Network, power and pen aware
*Security and Identity*	Simple and secure access with built-in WS-* coordination, on an improved foundation
*Search, Organize, Visualize*	Pervasive desktop search and integration with Windows Shell

2) Deliver great UX faster with Windows Vista:

Do more: Completeness and integration

To deliver on the promises of faster/cheaper/better, apps need to integrate a broad range of functionality: animated user interface, highly readable text rendering, visually adaptive data binding, web service integration, identity, workflow, and more. The Vista-era platform is unique not only because of its comprehensive feature set, but also because its depth and consistency make it practical to deliver the end-to-end integration required by next-gen UX.

Do it faster: Developer productivity

The Vista-era platform builds on the power and productivity of Visual Studio and managed code, making it possible for developers to deliver complete solutions in months, rather than years. Solutions that might previously have required expertise across Win32, DirectX, COM+ and more can now be addressed within the consistent framework of .NET Fx 3.0. XAML makes it possible to import high-fidelity UI directly from the applications graphic artists use create their designs, rather than today’s clumsy method of design/print/re-implement in code.

Together, the combination of more productive tools for coding and design achieve our goal of “democratizing rocket science”: making great UX achievable to a broad base of software developers.

Mitigating adoption blockers

We know developers appreciate the Web’s ease of deployment, security and ability to manage data and enforce corporate policy – areas where Windows needed to catch up. In the Vista era, we have caught up. WPF Express, ClickOnce, Code Access Security and broad Fx deployment mitigate key adoption blockers for building Windows applications. The adoption issue has been addressed by making .NET Fx 3.0, Desktop Search, IE 7, RSS and other key platform components available on Windows XP and Server 2003.

3) Great UX runs best on Windows Vista

Users will find that running next-generation applications on Windows Vista provides the following advantages:

· Performance

· Windows Vista supports a new display driver model (WDDM) specifically designed to optimize next generation UI. WDDM treats the GPU as a scheduled resource which can be assigned prioritized rendering tasks, just as Windows can prioritize how CPU time is allocated to multiple applications. This allows multiple high end user experiences to run simultaneously with better performance and memory usage than what is possible under the existing Windows XP display driver model.

· WDDM interfaces were designed to provide high reliability under the heavy GPU loads of next generation applications, enabling advanced features such as hardware accelerated rendering and 3-D anti-aliasing to be available by default on Windows Vista, whereas on Windows XP only select new video drivers that have gone through extra qualification testing will have these GPU features enabled.

· The entire Windows Vista OS has been tuned and optimized to deliver consistently high performance. From the updated memory manager (SuperFetch) which pre-loads the most commonly used data, to I/O prioritization (faster access to disk for the foreground application,) to the streamlined networking stack (better TCP/IP performance) to “glitch-free” media (tuned audio and video stack), users will find that applications will be most responsive when run on Windows Vista.

· Windows ReadyBoost™ makes lets users make their PC more responsive by using flash memory on a USB drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, or other memory form factor to boost system performance.

· Windows System Performance Rating (WinSPR) provides a simple, single numeric rating to express system performance capabilities, so that users can understand how capable their PC is and whether it meets the suggested requirements for a particular applications.

· Security:

· The Windows Vista engineering team followed the Security Design Lifecycle during the development of the product, reviewing each component to determine mitigations for the most likely security risks. The combination of automated tools analyzing every line of source code for potential design flaws, compilation tools to prevent buffer overflows, and support for Data Execution Protection make Windows Vista less vulnerable to security risks than even Windows XP SP 2.

· One of the most significant improvements in Windows Vista is User Account Control, which increases security and manageability by enabling applications to run without administrator privileges. This helps reduce the impact of malware, unintentional application defects, and unapproved system changes. File and registry virtualization will enable many applications to automatically work on Windows Vista with standard user privileges. With the Administrator Approval Mode feature, even users with Administrator accounts can run most applications with limited privileges, only elevating when necessary to perform specific administrative tasks.

· IE 7 uses Windows Vista’s Mandatory Integrity Control infrastructure to run in a low-rights protected mode. By running in a context with even fewer rights than a normal user, the risk of exploitation via malicious web sites is reduced even further. By running at the low integrity level, IE will not be able to modify any of the user’s data or the Windows binaries on the machine. Any files that are written will also be marked with the low integrity level, so downloaded apps in turn run at low integrity, adding an extra layer of security.

· Windows Activation Service (WAS) provides a central broker that can take incoming network requests and route them to the appropriate service or application, reducing the need for developers to write custom NT services to manage their own service activation. Having fewer services running with high local system privileges reduces the potential attack surface of the system. WAS also provides process health monitoring and failure recycling for a more robust system. Built-in support of poison queues for receiving messages that cannot be processed makes building fault-tolerant systems easier.

· Users with x64-based systems gain the additional protections of 64-bit driver signing and patch protection, ensuring that users know which drivers, from which companies, are installed on their system. Patch guarding prevents kernel-mode drivers from extending or replacing other kernel services, helping protect against malware such as rootkits.

· TPM-based Services allow developers to enforce security with the support of dedicated Trusted Platform Module chips, reducing the risk of system compromise even if an attacker has access to the physical hard disk or PC.

· The new Windows Firewall with Advanced Security integrates host-based network port filtering with IPSec to enable easy-to-create, comprehensive security policies, while the improved Filtering API allows applications to narrowly specify which network traffic should be allowed through.

· Management and reliability:

· Windows Vista introduces a number of new features to improve management and reliability. From improvements in imaging and deployment, to backup technology, to a redesigned, schematized event infrastructure and reliability and performance monitors, to asynchronous I/O cancellation, to policy-based Quality of Service, to power management, users and IT pros alike will notice improvements in the overall reliability of the system and applications running on Windows Vista.

· Applications will be less likely to require a reboot upon installation thanks to Restart Manager. When a reboot cannot be avoided, applications can use Smart Relaunch capabilities to let users continue working exactly where they left off. Application Recovery help preserve application state and unsaved changes in case of an unexpected application termination.

· Transacted File System and Registry allow developers to ensure the integrity of multiple updates to files and registry keys, reducing the likelihood of leaving the application in a partially updated or unstable state.

Windows Vista software logo guidelines draft available

jmazner — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 23:44:00 GMT

I just discovered that an early draft (version .5) of the logo guidelines for Windows Vista software is available here. It's only a draft, but it gives you a good idea of the basics you have to implement in order to qualify for the Windows Vista logo. Enjoy!

Developer's guide to new Vista APIs

jmazner — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 23:44:00 GMT

Last month, the MSDN team published a doc that's long been in the works -- a developer's introduction to some of the new APIs in Windows Vista. The real meat is in the .chm file (self-extracting exe), with some sample code and detailed API info.

This is only a start, and it covers only a small portion of the new platform features in Vista, but it's a good place to start learning about how to make applications really light up on Vista.

How to build a great Windows Vista app

jmazner — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 21:59:00 GMT

One of the goodies that PDC attendees will find in their swag bag is a poster called "Lighting up on Windows Vista". It lists the top 10 things developers can do to build apps that will run like a dream on our new OS release.

We've now posted a short whitepaper that adds some technical background and documenation to that poster. If you're looking for a good quick answer to the question "is there anything new or interesting in Windows Vista?", this is a pretty good place to start getting answers. We have lots of PDC sessions that drill deeper into these technologies as well, and as the week progresses we will be making the slides from those talks available.

tag: PDC05

Windows Vista dev overviews now up!

jmazner — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:04:00 GMT

check it out, http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/

PDC registration now open

jmazner — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 21:14:00 GMT

I have a long list of backlogged things to post about...but for now, I just want to quickly note that registration is open! We also posted 50+ session titles -- these aren't the final titles, but they give a pretty good flavor for the kinds of things we'll be covering. You'll see some info about IE in there, and lots about Longhorn. There will be even more details coming over the next two months as we finalize the session list and speakers.

Now hiring: Longhorn Technical Evangelists

jmazner — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 02:26:00 GMT

My team is looking to hire two new technical evangelists to focus on Longhorn. The positions are all about helping developers take advantage of new platform features unique to Longhorn. As an evangelist, your job is to understand what the product team is building, distill it all down to a simple explanation of value for developers, and then show the worldwide developer community how to take advantage of the new platform. You’ll be on point to work with key early adopter partners to highlight how apps can light up on Longhorn. The ideal candidate is someone who’s spent a lot of time developing top notch Windows client applications, and wants to help other developers do the same (more info in the job description)

We haven’t publicly disclosed all the new functionality for developers in Longhorn, although you can get some hints by browsing the WinHEC session list.

If you’re interested, please submit a resume (for job number 131029) and get in touch with me.

I’d be happy if search engines noticed that this post is about “Microsoft evangelism jobs” ;)

[update: modified link to actually point directly to the job description, since MS.COM seems to have changed the format of their permalinks]

Non administrator: running with least privilege

jmazner — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 01:41:00 GMT

A reader emailed me a question about running under a non-administrator account in Windows today, which prompted me to do a little MSNSearch-ing. That lead me very quickly to Aaron Margosis's excellent blog. If you are interested in how you can get by in life without having to run every process as an admin, check out Aaron's post on RunAs, and then read the rest of Aaron's recent entries. Check out the nice utilities he's put together, MakeMeAdmin and PrivBar.

If you're thinking to yourself "why doesn't Microsoft build this stuff right into Windows", rest assured that you are not alone. Back at the 2003 PDC, the security team talked about apps running under least privilege. Keith's April 2004 article was based on older builds and plans have changed somewhat since then, but it's definitely on the list of areas to focus on for Longhorn.

Stunning PDC details revealed!

jmazner — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 01:45:00 GMT

Okay, maybe not so stunning, but in response to several requests that have come in from commenters and private email, I’m happy to be able to share a few key details that might help those of you trying to figure out your conference plans and budget for the rest of the calendar year.

Content:

As I noted previously, PDC is focused on our forward looking platform roadmap. If you’re looking for education on shipping or soon-to-be shipping Microsoft software, TechEd might be a better choice. Likewise, if you’re an IT administrator, TechEd will be a better fit for you. PDC is really geared towards developers who will be making platform technology decisions and need to understand Microsoft’s future roadmap.

So, what counts as “future roadmap technology” and thus meets the bar for presence at PDC? There are some obvious suspects that come to mind – Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo and WinFS are all technologies we covered in 2003, and we’ll be revisiting them all to show how we’re progressing against the vision and goals we talked about in 2003. We’ll likely also include discussion around some newer technologies that haven’t been discussed publicly yet.

Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) and Yukon (SQL Server 2005), which are about to become our current generation platform technologies, likely will not have a lot of broad content. These technologies are so close to shipping that they aren’t really part of the future roadmap, they’re part of the here-and-now story. That’s why they will have tons of broad educational/training content at TechEd. What we will likely do for Whidbey and Yukon at PDC is focus on some really deep architectural and performance content, 400-level stuff that will help you understand how we intended the technologies to be used and how to get the maximum benefit from them. We'll also have some content in our pre-conference sessions.

Price:

The conference fee will be the same as last year. Full price will be $1995, but we’ll offer some discounts, including a 15% early bird discount. We expect to open registration on the main site by the end of May, and then you’ll be eligible for the early bird discount for around a month or two after that. The pre-conference sessions will have an additional fee associated with them, I'll have to check on whether we're ready to share the price for that yet.

Hope that helps with your budget and conference planning!

PDC planning and your input

jmazner — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 20:21:00 GMT

Back in January, my manager (Steve Cellini) mentioned that he’d kindly volunteered me to be Content Owner for PDC. I haven’t blogged about that yet, as I’ve been spending the past 6 weeks trying to get my head wrapped around what exactly it is that I’m supposed to be doing. I’m finally starting to get clarity – which means not that I have all the answers, but that I’m starting to get a sense of what questions to ask, at least.

Here’s the first one that comes to mind. Why do you attend to PDC? What do you hope to get out of the experience, and what makes it worth the cost of attending? We know from our attendee survey in 2003 that around a quarter of our guests said they just wanted to keep up to date on existing technology, and another two thirds said they wanted to learn about new technology.

But what does it really mean to want to learn about a technology? I can think of a few different intentions:

I want to see Microsoft’s big picture vision and demos of future apps, to inspire me in planning the next version of my own app/features.
I want to understand what the big new pieces of platform technology provide, so that I understand what new end-user capabilities I can add to my app and how to architect my app to support them
I want to deeply understand the internal architecture of these new platform technologies, so that I can evaluate whether they are robust enough to meet my app’s needs
I want to learn about how Microsoft expects its platform to be used, so that I can be sure I’m implementing best practice architecture and coding in my own apps that leverage MS technology.
I want to learn how to write code against the new platform technology, so that I can start hacking on this stuff on the plane ride home and see if I can make it do anything useful
I want to talk with my peers, architects and developers at MS and other companies, to understand how they’re approaching technology and make sure I’m not missing the next big thing.

And there are probably more beyond that. I expect most people don’t have just one answer, but it would be interesting to see how you balance these goals. Do you want to spend 10% of your time on #1, and 90% of your time on #6? An even split of 16% of your time across all 6 areas?

We’re early on in the content planning process, and this is the time for me to guide what kind of breakout sessions, labs, pre-conference sessions, etc, we’ll be providing. So, what do you want to see? If you’ve attended PDC in the past, what did you like/dislike? If you haven’t attended PDC, in favor of other industry conferences, why? If you don’t think conferences are a valuable use of your time and money, why not?

Post a comment, or better yet, blog your thoughts and send me a trackback so I can read them. I've plenty more questions to ask in the next several months if we can get a good dialogue going...

Recent statements on WinFS, "Project Green"

jmazner — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:51:00 GMT

Here are a couple pointers to the latest info we've made public on some ongoing development projects. I don't have any more insight to add, just wanted to make sure the links were out there in the world.

WinFS:

Comments from Product Manager Tom Rizzo in Microsoft Watch (and the requisite rampant speculation on Slashdot)

"Project Green" update from Convergence:

"Project Green," the code name for next-generation Microsoft Business Solutions' development efforts, will be delivered over the course of two waves. The first wave will occur between 2005 and 2007, and will include the release of a shared user interface based around 50 common configurable roles that people have within a company, all seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Office. Microsoft's business applications also will interoperate with service-oriented applications and include a common configurable reporting environment based on SQL Server (TM) Reporting Services and a common security-enhanced intranet and extranet environment based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server to enable new levels of collaboration within and across companies.

The second release wave, which will begin shipping in 2008, will build on the first wave's innovation and apply a model-driven approach to business processes. Innovations released during the second wave will draw on the power of WinFX (TM) and Visual Studio® .NET.

BusinessWeek on the LH changes

jmazner — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 00:30:00 GMT

I hadn't seen this one referenced anywhere else...so here it is, with no additional comments from me ;)

And then it seems like Jay Greene expanded on this original reporting for an article in the magazine, now available via Yahoo!. I wish he'd talked to some ISVs to get their opinions, rather than just Mike Ferris from RedHat. It is funny, though, that Mr. Ferris talks about "how non-innovative this is going to be."

By "this", do you think he meant Avalon and Indigo? I'm interested in seeing any project that RedHat is leading that's as innovative as either of these. I had a hard time finding any new innovation from RedHat on the Fedora page, maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Has RedHat done anything for developers (or users) as interesting as, say, Firefox?

Maybe by "this" he meant the 2006 Windows release? Below are a few quotes I found about some of the features planned for that release, again I'd be interested in seeing where RedHat is being more innovative. And we haven't even really started talking about end-user features of Longhorn, we've been focused on the developer platform up til now, so you can expect to hear more about interesting new end-user and managmenet capabilities as we get closer to launch.

http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=5509

As part of Longhorn, Allchin said customers can expect to see new features for intelligent auto configuration, such as BIOSes and firmware that can be “automatically updated in a seamless way.” Also, Allchin said Longhorn will include new functionality for server resiliency, such as self-healing characteristics, a more componentized architecture, and additional monitoring services with filters that can “dynamically” flow out to servers

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5327335.html

Some of the features he mentioned were "great roaming support," .Net Framework 2.0, "new browsing capabilities," the "fresh" user interface, improved migrations and deployments, "more resilience to malware" and "a new photo experience."

What happened to WinFS?

jmazner — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 03:55:00 GMT

Friday’s announcement has left a lot of people asking what happened to WinFS? The short answer is: nothing. But a lot happened to Windows.

As I explained in my previous post, the customer and developer feedback we’ve been getting was consistent on two points: We want to start using WinFX as soon as possible, and we don’t want to require Longhorn to run WinFX applications. To respond to this feedback, the product teams had to ask themselves what they could do to tighten their schedules, and figure out how well their platform would behave on XP.

The WinFS team spent a solid couple weeks going through this evaluation. There are of course plenty of things you could do to increase the confidence level on a project the size of WinFS, since it has so many features, including:

Built-in schemas for calendar, contacts, documents, media, etc
Etensibility for adding custom schema or business logic
File system integration, like promotion/demotion and valid win32 file paths
A synchronization runtime for keeping content up to date
Rich API support for app scenarios like grouping and filtering
A self-tuning management service to keep the system running well
Tools for deploying schema, data and applications

If you cut one of these, or reduced its functionality, you could probably shorten the schedule. But I think the team concluded that the real sweet spot of WinFS is all these features delivered together, in an integrated package. The feedback I’ve heard from ISVs, certainly, is that if you take any one of these things away, you significantly diminish the value of WinFS overall.

In Bill’s interview with CNET, he talks about even adding additional features that ISVs have been asking for, such as “adding the tabular stuff and figuring out a server plan”. In his words, “The WinFS team, in terms of its progress and performance, is doing very, very good work, but it couldn't take the additional features and make an '06 schedule.”

The team also looked into what it would take to get WinFS working on XP. The biggest sticking point, as I understand, is around the file system integration. There have been several changes to NTFS in Longhorn which enable WinFS to guarantee consistency between an NTFS file and the WinFS Item which represents it. If you run WinFS on XP, you lose that guarantee, which could affect the reliability of the system (unless someone ports NTFS changes back to the XP code base, which makes for even more work to be done.)

So what happened to WinFS? Nothing. Others Windows teams concluded they could make some changes in order to deliver more quickly, and so they are accelerating and aiming to deliver to WinFX functionality on XP and Server 2003. The WinFS team concluded that neither of these was viable, so their plans are unchanged.

Actually, “unchanged” is misleading. They are updating a lot of their plans. The API went through one of Steven Clarke’s usability studies, and the API team has really listened to that feedback and come up with some new API patterns and a revised data model. I have seen the proposed changes and they are a huge improvement. The schema team has been busy taking feedback on the default, in-the-box schemas, and those are getting refined as well. The performance team has achieved tenfold gains in some areas, and they’re really just getting started with the profiling and tuning process. The file system integration team has been working closely with ISVs to tune the promotion/demotion model. The core data model team has been working with MBF to come up with a single model that will support information worker apps, PIM apps, and line of business apps. There’s a team hard at work figuring out how WinFS feature manifest themselves in the next release of Windows Server, as well as the next release of SQL Server.

The work the entire WinFS team is doing is really amazing, and I am looking forward to the day that we can share some of it back out to the community.

Do I wish we could have found a way to include WinFS in the 2006 releases announced yesterday? Yes. But am I glad that the team stayed focus on building the right thing for ISVs, and accepted the trade off is shipping in 2007? Emphatically yes.

What happened to Longhorn?

jmazner — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 03:49:00 GMT

Well, that was an exciting announcement. There’s a good CNET interview with BillG that provides insight into the decision. Here’s my perspective on what happened

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from customers about WinFX. Among the things we heard:

Indigo is great, but I need to use the same communications API for all my apps, whether they’re LH, XP or Server. Don’t make me use Indigo for LH and WSE for XP.
Avalon is great, but I don’t want to have to build a separate WinForms UI for my XP apps and then some different Avalon UI for LH
It will be a while before the majority of our customers are running LH on their desktops.
I wish I had WinFX for the app I’m building today!

So we listened, and did some thinking. We concluded we could meet the bulk of our customer needs by releasing WinFX as quickly as possible, supporting XP and Server 2003.

We also recognized that doing this would likely delay parts of WinFX that were planning on taking advantage of new features in LH (like WinFS...more to come on the subject in the next post,) but the value in releasing a subset of the original LH vision as quickly and broadly as possible outweighed the cost of deferring the full implementation

The upside to this plan is huge. Avalon and Indigo available on XP? And in 2006? That’s really just fantastic news. I can tell you that I am certainly excited about no longer having to speculate on when we’d have enough Longhorn desktops to justify taking a dependency on WinFX.

Jon Udell's blogs turn into a cover story

jmazner — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 16:49:00 GMT

Jon Udell has turned his series of blog entries on Longhorn into an InfoWorld cover story . His editor makes the point that the blogging drove some great discussion and contributions to the final article. It’s cool to see that discussions I took part in with Jon, like here and here, had an impact on the final article. I’m also glad that after talking to Quentin Clark, Jon concluded that “If you're investing today in XML document formats, you should expect WinFS to do a good job running XPath or XQuery searches over them”. There’s a lot more from Quentin on Jon’s blog.

I think the final article came out well. I particularly like the order in which Jon lays out the WinFX pillars, since this is exactly how I do it when I give a WinFX overview:

First you need to get your data, no matter what device, server or service it lives on. You want to get to it in a secure, reliable way. That’s Indigo
Now you need a way to store it locally, so that you can find the relationships between data from all these disparate sources and turn it into useful information. That’s WinFS.
Finally, you want a way to see that information, a compelling visualization that makes sense of it all. That’s Avalon.

Jon also made the point about WinFX betting heavily on .NET as a foundation: “One thing that's not in question, however, is Longhorn's deep commitment to .Net. […] That's great news for the long-term health of Windows, the productivity of its developers, and the security of its users.” I’d agree. When ISVs ask what they can do to get ready for Longhorn, the first step is to get familiar with .NET and managed code. If you have an existing Win32 app, look into the enhanced C++/CLI support in Visual Studio 2005. If you’re starting on a new app, write it in managed code from the start.

Only one sentence in the article struck me as not quite right: “Microsoft is doing nothing to improve Internet Explorer's support for DOM, CSS, SVG, or other standard ways to enrich the browser.” It might be accurate to say that the Avalon team aren’t investing here, but read the comments of IE’s Group Program Manager, Tony Chor, over at Channel9, or read IE Program Manager Dave Massy’s blog, or take a look at the community discussion on the IE wiki. I’m pretty sure these guys are doing more than nothing to enrich the browser.

Thanks to Scoble for pointing out that the article had hit the web.