Security and Web integration key to Longhorn

LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. let loose early bits of Longhorn at its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here and for the first time provided more extensive details around the key components of its next Windows operating system expected out in 2006.

Though Microsoft repeated that it would release a server version of Longhorn, the company would only discuss the client operating system. It is early days for the Longhorn client and way too early for the Longhorn server, Microsoft officials said here.

Longhorn is build up of three components on top of a layer of "fundamentals" that includes security and technology to make sure applications and drivers don't conflict. On top of those fundamentals sit Avalon, WinFS and Indigo, the codenames that with the Longhorn name itself have fed the rumor mills for the past years.

Avalon is the presentation subsystem of Longhorn, WinFS is the unified storage system built on top of Windows' existing file system NTFS, and Indigo combines all Windows communication technologies.

Microsoft officials, visibly happy that they could now talk about what they have been working on in secrecy, provided lengthy and deeply technical explanations of the technology behind the codenames. To be brief, Longhorn promises to give users a secure operating system with a new way to store files, revamped graphics and tight links to the Web.

For software developers, the operating system, though bringing a myriad of changes, should be easier to develop for and it will also run existing applications, dating all the way back to the days of DOS, the disk operating system.

Other than security and conflict prevention, the Longhorn fundamentals will also offer technology called SuperFetch that helps start an application faster, ClickOnce that makes it easy to install applications on a single PC or across a network, as well as technology that makes it easy to migrate from one machine to another, Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin said in a keynote address on Monday.

"ClickOnce is the ability to just do an Xcopy, the equivalent of an Xcopy, to a machine," Allchin said.

Avalon, the Longhorn presentation system, had been little talked about until the PDC. With Avalon, Microsoft is leaving the bitmap behind it and is moving to vector-based graphics and a single graphics system. This promises better graphics and performance, said Darryn Dieken, group program manager for Windows client, speaking on Tuesday.

Today, Windows uses three different graphics APIs (application programming interfaces), to display video, two-dimensional or three-dimensional images, Dieken said. This slows down the system and requires software developers to write more code, which makes the system more error prone, he said.

Whether users will get the full benefits of Avalon will depend on the hardware, Dieken said. The new transparent windows feature, for example, will only work with hardware that is better than the average graphics card and processor in today's PCs, Dieken said.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates during his keynote Monday gave Microsoft's expectation of a PC in 2006. The PC is to sport a 4GHz to 6GHz processor with two cores, over 2GB of RAM, more than 1TB of disk storage, and a graphics processor three times as powerful as those found in today's PCs, he said.