Microsoft Windows Vista

A New Opreating System From Microsoft

Windows Vista introduces breakthroughs in user experience, security and reliability, enabling you to build applications that bring clarity to the user's complex world of information.

Windows Vista™ (formerly Windows code name "Longhorn") is a substantial advance in Windows, with significant innovations in the developer platform. Windows Vista makes it easier than ever before to build applications that are more secure, reliable, and manageable. Windows Vista also enables developers and designers to create user-experience breakthroughs that improve usability and enable greater relevance to the work users do. Finally, Windows Vista makes it easy to connect to information, systems, people, and devices though a number of innovative integration technologies.

Introduction
With the advances in Windows Vista™, Microsoft enables the Windows platform to deliver on three key essentials:

Helping people to be more confident by making the operating system safer, more reliable, and more responsive
Helping people gain clarity by removing clutter and improving organization
Helping people connect with others easily and securely by improving network security and integration collaboration
Windows Vista empowers developers to create software that embodies these three essentials. Windows Vista improves application quality, enables developers to create richer, easier-to-use applications, and adds comprehensive APIs for accessing connectivity infrastructure.

Broadly, there are eight primary areas of focus for Windows Vista, each having a unique impact in terms of how they help developers:

Create the Experience: A distinguishing characteristic of Windows Vista-wave applications will be the breakthrough user experience, providing developers with new ways to make software more productive and relevant for users, and in many cases just plain fun to use.
Secure it: Windows Vista extends the commitment Microsoft made in Windows XP SP2 to help users stay secure by extending the platform to make it easier for developers to build secure applications. Features like User Account Protection, split security tokens, and Code Access Security (CAS) allow developers to minimize the attack surface of their applications by enabling only the minimum privileges needed for applications to function correctly.

Make it Reliable: For both end users and IT professionals, a reliable application is one that behaves exactly as expected and handles the unexpected gracefully. Windows Vista offers an extensive set of new APIs for developers to make applications predictable and reliable to end users, and to diagnose them when they aren't. Enhanced developer portal services will enable analysis of application behavior in real-world customer deployments.

Get connected: Windows Vista will make it easy for users to connect with their friends and colleagues, whether that means consuming a Web service from across the country or peer-to-peer sharing across a conference room. Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named "Indigo") APIs make it simple to consume and expose a new generation of Web services. New peer-to-peer functionality lets you discover and interact with other nearby devices, enabling a range of new scenarios for interacting with others.

Integrate data: The Windows Vista platform introduces several new features that make it easier for applications to find and share the data users want to see. A new XML-based file format—the same one used as the default in Office 12—makes it possible to manipulate data in any document, while RSS (Really Simple Syndication) APIs and a shared RSS store will allow developers to easily RSS-enable Windows Vista applications and provide central access to feeds, lists, and attachments for users.

Be discoverable: Windows Vista will give users new ways to search and organize their files and data, emphasizing application metadata and search over traditional filename and folder hierarchies. Developers can add these capabilities to Windows Vista applications, as well as extend the system to make sure documents and data created by their software seamlessly integrate into the default "search and organize" experience.

Make it deployable: Application installation is the first and last impression that software makes on its users. Windows Vista will make it simpler to write robust installers that users can trust to put application files in place seamlessly, with an uninstall experience that's just as consistent. Windows Vista-wave improvements to ClickOnce will also enable rapid application setup with minimal overhead.

Go mobile: With laptops outselling desktops in the enterprise, Windows Vista-wave applications will be built to keep working as the user walks from the office to the local wireless café to home. Windows Vista provides new capabilities for detecting network and power state, and automatically synchronizes application data when necessary. Windows Vista will also take advantage of mobile devices like Tablet PCs, Pocket PCs, and auxiliary displays.


Developer Platform Evolution
An evolution for both Win32™ and WinFX™ begins with Windows Vista-era advances to the .NET Framework. These two programming models will enable every developer to target the advances in Windows Vista, including improved presentation and communication subsystems, improved connectivity, and substantial advances in the core security, manageability, and reliability of Windows.

It's important to note that Windows Vista is heavily emphasizing both application compatibility (existing applications should always just run) and developer compatibility (all features are accessible through both WinFX and Win32). All existing source code and programming skills apply for Windows Vista developers, whether they're C++/MFC developers or Visual Basic .NET/Windows Forms developers.


WinFX
WinFX is Windows Vista's managed-code programming model, building on and extending the .NET Framework. WinFX offers both practical solutions to today's software challenges and new opportunities to create software and services not possible now. It enables both developers and designers to quickly create new applications and experiences that are more reliable and secure, visually stunning, smarter about information management, better connected, and more collaborative.

A primary goal of WinFX is to make it simple for developers to build a broad variety of applications more quickly than they can today, whether they're part of a development team in a Global 100 company or in a small ISV. To do this, WinFX delivers:

A consistent programming model across all Windows Vista features
A single, intuitive, "right way" to do common tasks
High-level class libraries that encapsulate common tasks
A familiar programming paradigm that builds on existing skills
A framework that is "tool-friendly"
WinFX also focuses on helping developers improve software quality. One of the largest challenges facing developers today is how to build secure, reliable, scalable, versionable, and deployable applications easily. WinFX will provide a programming platform that makes it much easier for developers to deliver this kind of quality across the application lifecycle without sacrificing productivity. To do this, WinFX will deliver:

Deployment and update support that is simple for developers to understand
Security support for common tasks that is transparent to the developer
Default capabilities that eliminate common programming errors such as buffer overruns
WinFX also begins to reduce the gap between developers and designers to enable them to create better looking, easier-to-use applications. Traditional system-level APIs like Win32 were primarily focused on the system software developer as a customer. WinFX represents an opportunity to reach out to new customers, and consequently it needs to be simpler to build applications on. Since a core feature of Windows Vista is the new Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named "Avalon") subsystem and the AERO shell, a core customer will become the "designer" who will help provide a rich, elegant user experience.


Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code name "Indigo") is Microsoft's next-generation Web services technology, and is also exposed through WinFX. Windows Communication Foundation takes Web services to the next level by providing developers with a highly productive framework for building secure, reliable, and interoperable applications. It extends the .NET Framework 2.0 with additional functionality, enabling more than six million Visual Studio developers worldwide to build connected systems using the programming languages they already know. This results in less complexity for developers, fewer components to be managed by IT professionals, reduced training for both, and significant cost savings for the organization.

Windows Communication Foundation will radically simplify how the next generation of connected systems is built. It accomplishes this through three architectural design goals:

Built-in support for a broad set of Web services protocols
Implicit use of service-oriented development principles
A single API for building connected systems
Broad Support for Web Services
Today's Web services technologies provide support for basic interoperability between applications running on different platforms. However, most of these technologies lack the ability to achieve this interoperability with guarantees for end-to-end security and reliable communication. Windows Communication Foundation delivers secure, reliable, transacted interoperability through built-in support for the WS-* specifications. For developers, this drastically reduces the amount of infrastructure code required to achieve heterogeneous interoperability. For businesses, it means the ability to interact with customers, partners, and suppliers, both within and beyond the walls of the organization, regardless of the platform they use.

Service-Oriented Design
For years, developers and organizations have struggled to build software that adapts at the speed of business. Service-oriented development principles help overcome this challenge with architectural best practices for building highly adaptable software. Windows Communication Foundation is the first programming model built from the ground up to provide implicit service-oriented application development. This enables developers to build services that are autonomous and can be versioned independently of one another, thereby reducing long-term upgrade and maintenance costs. For businesses, this facilitates an IT infrastructure that is resilient to inevitable change, and is easier to manage over time.



Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML
Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code name "Avalon") is Microsoft's unified presentation subsystem for Windows, and is exposed through WinFX. It consists of a display engine and a managed-code framework. Windows Presentation Foundation unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interface (UI), enabling developers and designers to create visually stunning, differentiated user experiences.

When it ships, scheduled for 2006, Windows Presentation Foundation will also be available on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and all future releases of the Windows operating system.


Windows Presentation Foundation
Windows Presentation Foundation consists of two main parts: the engine and the programming framework.

The Windows Presentation Foundation Engine. The Windows Presentation Foundation engine unifies the way developers and designers experience documents, media, and UI, providing a single runtime for browser-based experiences, forms-based applications, graphics, video, audio, and documents. Windows Presentation Foundation allows your application to unleash the full power of the graphics hardware present in modern computers, and is engineered to exploit future advances in hardware. For example, Windows Presentation Foundation's vector-based rendering engine enables applications to scale to take advantage of high-DPI monitors without requiring extra work on the part of the developer or user. Similarly, when Windows Presentation Foundation detects a video card that supports hardware acceleration, it will take advantage of it.
The Windows Presentation Foundation Framework. The Windows Presentation Foundation framework delivers solutions for media, user interface design, and documents that go well beyond what developers have today. Windows Presentation Foundation is designed for extensibility, enabling developers to create their own controls on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation engine "from the ground up" or by subclassing existing Windows Presentation Foundation controls. Central to the Windows Presentation Foundation framework are controls for shapes, documents, images, video, animation, 3D and "panels" in which to place controls and content. These "primitives" provide the building blocks for developing next-generation user experiences.
At the same time Microsoft introduces Windows Presentation Foundation, it will also introduce XAML, a markup language to declaratively represent user interface for Windows applications, improving the richness of the tools with which developers and designers can compose and repurpose UI. For Web developers, XAML provides a familiar UI description paradigm. XAML also enables the separation of UI design from the underlying code, enabling developers and designers to work more closely together.


Why Windows Presentation Foundation?
For businesses, Windows Presentation Foundation enables improved customer relationships and differentiated applications. It empowers businesses to create strong digital customer relationships and unique branding opportunities by providing the technology to quickly deliver visually stunning, distinctive user experiences that create an affinity with customers. Moreover, because of Windows Presentation Foundation's integration of forms, documents, video, 3D, and more, businesses can create durable user-experience solutions that integrate into customers' everyday activities.

For developers and designers, Windows Presentation Foundation provides a unified UI platform, so that they can learn a single paradigm with limitless possibilities for UI experiences. For .NET developers, its framework will be familiar, and it will ultimately reduce the number of lines of code required to deliver optimal user experiences and communication logic. For designers, Windows Presentation Foundation offers a platform that eliminates boundaries between content, media, and applications. Most importantly, Windows Presentation Foundation has been engineered so that developers and designers can work closely together synchronously to quickly deliver differentiated, connected experiences.