posted on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 8:03 PM
by
Benjy
Longhorn -not by a long shot
If you ask me, I think it sucks!! Not having WinFS in the 2006 release is a cop-out. I have one question. Why would anyone want to move to Longhorn? You might say for Avalon and Indigo, but then Avalon and Indigo are going to be available on XP and 2003 too, so there's no reason to move to Longhorn.
Also if you consider security and stability, XP and 2003 (which would have had R2 by then) would be finally stabilising, at least in the eyes of security conscious enterprises. In contrast Longhorn would be a first release and very few people buy the first release of any software. Sure, a lot of these security features would be baked into the product , but then again there are bound to be a few hundred more 'potentially dangerous" critters out in the open at that time and the fact that only the client version is out wont stop them. Clients are more likely to be open to attack.
WinFS is the only thing that would make Longhorn really attractive for me. Having the RDBMS as the de-facto format for everything including Exchange databases is very cool from a deployment point of view.
From a .NET Developers point of view, ObjectSpaces moves further away. I saw a 3 part post on one of the ObjectSpaces developers blog about why ObjectSpaces was moved from Whidbey to fit into Longhorn WinFS, but where will it go now ? And when it does finally come out will we really care? NHibernate would probably be in version 10 by then.
Other posts on other sites have discussed how MS would be losing out to Apple in the database backed file system storage and all that so I wont repeat all that here but I wasnt aware that Apple had advanced so far !!
It seems to be just another money making exercise. Force everyone to upgrade to a new OS even if there isnt anything worth upgrading for. Hmm.. now where have we heard that before?