Longhorn RESET caused by .Net? | The Coffeehouse

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

In the Jan-4th episode of This Week in Tech, Robert Scoble joined Leo for a discussion of... the week's tech. At about the 26 minutes mark, the subject of the great Longhorn RESET came up.

Robert said the cause of the reset was that too much .Net was written for Longhorn, and .Net "was not up to the job."

You can listen to the excerpt here.

Now, I think the RESET is one of the more interesting story in software engineering, yet, there's so little known about it. It should be studied by little kids, taught in school like the civil war, and maybe be subject of Broadway plays (ok, maybe not that last one).

It was probably not caused by .Net, but what if...

So, the accepted story is that Longhorn was written on top of the XP codebase. But then the powers that be decided to unify the OS codebases, and have Longhorn written off the WS 2003 codebase. Hence the reset.

Would MS say so if .Net is the cause of the RESET? I would think not. Since I know so little about it, I'm gonna play a little conspiracy theorist. Watching this morning's show Windows Scenic Animation Overview I can't help but think that native library should've precede WPF, not showing up 2 years after WPF. We also saw various backports of WPF for native tools.

Isn't the biggest part of WCF, Indigo? That pillar surely didn't ship with Vista.

WinFS got cut... was that to be implemented as a manage library as well?

And how much of the "Fundamentals" started out as managed code?

So, was the RESET caused mainly by MS trying to churn out these managed pillars? I wonder what the real story is. I wonder if we'd ever know...

http://www.codeguru.com/dbfiles/get_image.php?id=10087&lbl=PILLARS_JPG&ds=20050725

brian.shapiro
things go on as always

Even though Microsoft later denied that they were ever intending to make the Windows shell based on WPF or make the next release of Office based on WPF, there was a lot of communication from Microsoft which suggested that they actually were intending that. It always felt to me like Microsoft was backtracking, after they realized their big 'bet the company' move wasn't working out.

AndyC

They said it was due to .NET at the time. You have to remember that CLR version 2 wasn't ready at the time and the circular dependencies were causing all manner of issues, for Longhorn, VS2005 and SQL server.

section31
OutOfCoffeeException

In reply to brian.shapiro

#Jan 10th @ 2:19 PM

Yes, and Windows 7 gets native code webservice support in competition to WCF? Why?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to section31

#Jan 10th @ 3:01 PM

Who is using WebServices outside of Enterprise anyway? UDDI is dead anyway.

DouglasH
Just Causual

I would say it is a little short sighted to say the reset occured because of .net.

It was more a dependacy issue than a .net issue. And a moving dependacy issue, things broke build to build because the underlying dependacy changed build to build.

Add to that the Sasser, Blaster and other worm attacks and the obvious fact that updates were not being applied.

Looking back, the Reset was caused more precisely by the Blaster Worm attack which forced MS to basically significantly rewrite and recompile portions of XP. portions of which were in 2k3. That undertaking took significant Manpower from the OS group to the support group at MS. Effectly stopping development on Vista.

The aftermath was that when sp2 was complete, the resulting code base synced with the 2k3 code base. And a Strong advancement in security from the base started in earnest. Part of the Security review was the new check in policy which was to ensure that the module was working before checked into main. so the concept was scaled back. also due to populiar demand some of the features were then abstracted and brought down level. (avalon being the biggest one)

of course this IMHO>

Douglas

spivonious

In reply to DouglasH

#Jan 10th @ 3:32 PM

I agree. The focus turned to security and MS had spent little or no time improving it for Longhorn. So they scrapped what they had and started over from an XP SP2 base.