Comment Articles

Longhorn: The nuts and bolts

John Carroll ZDNet.com

Published: 04 Nov 2003 15:55 GMT

The traditional model seen in WinForms and JFC, though necessary, places too much responsibility for layout in the hands of the programmer. With a cleaner separation between layout and code, a clearer division of labour arises which leverages what designers and developers individually do best.

Avalon works best with fast graphics accelerators, as it takes hardware acceleration deep into the heart of the Windows rendering system (better leveraging of DirectX/Direct3D). With GDI, only text rendering benefited from hardware acceleration, according to one of the session presenters. With Avalon, the whole windowing system will rely heavily on hardware acceleration to enable rapid construction of dynamically generated and complex user interfaces. Certain amounts of performance tuning between now and the final release will certainly ameliorate things for those with older graphics cards (in such cases, the CPU will have to work harder), but people with high-end video cards will have the best experience of Longhorn.

The Object File System: WinFS
The notion of files and folders as a manner in which data is logically organised on a disk is an old concept in computing. Data blobs constitute what are understood as "files", and these files are categorised into hierarchical folders. This model works well when you don't have too much data on your system. As hard drives and the amount of data we store on them grow inexorably larger, however, the model shows signs of strain. I am something of a data packrat, and quite literally, there are files squirrelled away somewhere on my hard drive that I have not seen in years simply because I have forgotten they exist.

A better approach comes from an analysis of how users tend to access their file system. Usually, users hunt for specific categories of data. For instance, you look for all the audio media on your system, irrespective of folder or specific audio type, because you want to play them. You might look for all documents, regardless of type (Word, WordPerfect, etc.), that are "word processing" files. The folder model can be a hindrance in this case, unless you make the effort to properly categorise folders to ensure that all your media files and documents are in one place.

Furthermore, what if you wanted to look for all files associated with a particular court case regardless of folder location OR media type, or wanted to locate all the files (jpg images, text files, movie files, audio files) associated with a particular music group? Doing this is much harder in the file/folder model, and the "contains text" search that currently exists for folder searches is only an inexact approximation of what we are trying to do.