MSFT Longhorn My old friend Chris Sells was in town this week, and among other things, he gave a talk at the Minneapolis .NET user's group about what's coming in Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft Windows.

Lots of neat stuff is coming in Longhorn. However, you can't have it until 2006, and you probably won't want to have it until Longhorn SP1 is out in 2007. :-)

Some of the ideas aren't new - a GUI that uses the 3D accelerator is part of Mac OS/X, and XAML looks like it might be an XML version of the ascii format for NeXT Interface Builder .nib files. On the other hand, there are some deep ideas that are pretty new - WinFS is long-overdue. An OO datastore as part of the file system will be an enabling technology for some pretty nifty stuff. The query language needs some work, though...

Even so, it's good to see that the good ideas explored elsewhere are finding their way into the dominant OS - if we have to suffer Windows, at least let's make it so it doesn't suck.  ¶ 1:49 PM