When I first heard about the Managed world
or Managed Environment with windows code name longhorn in 2003, I was
interested about the idea, but I didn't believe that people will have
the urge to move from the existing Win32 environment to the new managed
one, although all the reasons and problems of the win32 it was very
stable and provided a good level of satisfaction with Windows users and
developers..
and in that time I couldn't argue with anyone if he said that
Windows Longhorn will fail in its goals, and people will just ignore it
and move on with their own environment (XP or 2000), and the days
proved that when Microsoft released another windows in the win32 family
(Windows Server 2003), and this gave the users a very strange feeling
because in my openion Win2003 was released very silently and without
any propaganda like Windows XP or even the propaganda with Windows
Loghorn even it wasn't released yet, and this gave me a good feeling
that Microsoft will not make such mistake of changing the environment
suddenly and they still have much to say about the new
environment....because the new fancy glassy GUI is not enough for the
majority of professional users to move to another age.
but a year after when Microsoft started to talk more about the
Longhorn components like Avalon, Indego, WinFs ... etc, this was really
great to have a very rich infrastructure that gives you the ability to
start developing a large scale systems without the need to care about
the environment complexities, and this feeling started to grow inside
me with every article I read about the WinFX and its components and now
I think the world is not just ready to use Windows Vista (previously
Longhorn) but the world now needs Windows Vista inspite of its fancy
gui components.
Also one of main reasons for this change in the global thinking in
my opinion is the Windows Work Flow Foundation which is a great
component shipped with Windows Vista which brings the Work Flow
problems down to the infrastructure level and gives the developer the
great tools to modify and customize the workflow behavior, this really
will make a lot of enterprise systems to start growing more and more in
the windows Vista, also with the new security models shipped with the
Windows Vista.
I think we will have our fun with Windows Vista and we can simply
says that Windows Vista is not just another version of Windows, but it
is another Era of technology