Here’s just a funny tidbit I found some time ago to keep you guys entertained. In an interview on Channel9, Robert Scoble asks a designer on the Windows team, Jenny Lam some questions about Vista and how its coming up Channel9. During the interview the following comes up on the subject of wallpapers:
After the painful experience of repeatedly changing names during the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 development cycles, Microsoft decided to introduce a common, global branding API into Longhorn. The foundations of this system are present right from build 3683.
A couple of years ago, I put together a sample tile written in .NET 1.1 / Visual Studio 2003 for Longhorn build 3683. This sample tile simply reads the current OS Version from Environment.OSVersion.
DCE (Desktop Composition Engine) is the component of Longhorn responsible for rendering the desktop and all windows using the GPU (unlike previous versions that relied on the CPU). In Longhorn build 3706, DCE was broken, causing BSODs when attempting to activate it on real hardware, though it did work in certain versions of VMWare.
A big new thing in Longhorn were the tasks and help topics integrated into Explorer. Many builds show an empty space where these tasks would go in Explorer’s task pane, but no tasks are showing. In this post I’ll describe the step-by-step process of getting these tasks to work on build 4042. The idea is that we go from an empty pane to a nice and completely filled pane like in the image below.
Reading up on Longhorn’s development process, and you’ll read a lot about how the shell or user interface was redeveloped using the .NET Framework, and many people infer that this meant using C#, including a number of Microsoft employees. This has then been blamed for the poor performance of Longhorn and in particular, is often cited as the cause for its numerous memory leaks.
“protoPlex” was a project that ran during 2008, organised by Thomas Hounsell and overlapping heavily with the Longhorn 08 team. The aim was to build on a Longhorn build 3718 base, and develop some early plex concepts demonstrated by Microsoft.
Driver Packages These packages are some extracted drivers from the VMWare Guest Additions. The tools themselves are not compatible with Longhorn, although the drivers themselves maintained compatibility for much longer.
I’m on some sort of “write down all the things” spree, documenting things I’ve found in the past, but never properly have written down here on longhorn.ms. Today I’d like to have a brief look at this unidentified build.
If you want to take your Longhorn Experience to the next level, you probably want to run it on real hardware and not just in a virtual machine or emulator. Getting the best hardware for Longhorn is a tricky process, so we’ll take you through our recommendations.
At the time of the major reset in late 2004, Windows Server 2003 SP1 RC (Release Candidate) was the latest official Windows product. This version served as the foundation for rebuilding the operating system.
Thanks to Lucas Brooks for letting me use his post from BetaArchive. I did a bit of research on Longhorn’s theme format, and figured out some things perhaps never fully documented before. I wrote a .msstyles decompiler, that can turn compiled packthem v4 themes into .INIs and resources (like Windows XP themes).