Will WinFX, Longhorn's new programming interface, look sufficiently familiar to experienced Windows programmers?
Well, anyone who has worked with managed code will see that WinFX is taking APIs (application programming interfaces) and doing them in a very consistent, rich way for managed access. Anyone who has seen the .Net framework will see this as an evolution of that. There has been a switch in the last four years toward using managed code. I'd say maybe half of the stuff that gets done now is in managed code. So that just pushes this a little bit further.
On my last slide (at Monday's keynote) I had five action items: fundamentals, which are all of the things around security and updating and managed code; use managed code; use Web services; take advantage of the rich client; and, finally, get involved in the Windows communities that will really shape what we end up doing in Longhorn.
Can you talk a little bit about how some other Microsoft systems and initiatives, such as Xbox, embedded systems, Tablet PC, etc., fit into the Longhorn scenario?
Tablet came out a year ago. We have over 400,000 of those machines out now. A new update of the Tablet Windows software will ship sometime next year. Then, there will be a major update of Tablet software with Longhorn. And so we are really thinking about how ink and voice fit into the shell, and even in the demos, we showed how to do little ink annotations on the files -- like a sticky note. The whole recognition and infrastructure for dealing with ink is dramatically advanced in Longhorn.
We get some of that in this intermediate release, but the really big release is Longhorn. So every group at Microsoft is talking about the Longhorn wave.
So every group at Microsoft is talking about the Longhorn wave. We may have a few groups have releases between now and Longhorn, like Tablet and Media Center. But most have done their pre-Longhorn release and are now focused on the Longhorn wave.
