Saturday, February 17, 2007

Windows Vista - Post 4

Vista Review: Development of Windows Vista in 2003 and early 2004: New technology (Part C)

Milestone 4
Build 3718 was completed on November 19, 2002. After that for long time there was no sign of activity from Microsoft. But Microsoft was on its way to work. Next year, on February 19, 2003 Microsoft completed its next build – Build 4008. Like others which made its appearance on net in the first week of March, 2003. The Build 4008 was confidentially handled with selected group of developers. Some evolutionary features had been added to it, adding with a modified blue – Plex – theme, new simplified Windows Image based installer that was capable to operate in graphical mode from the outset, and complete an install of the operating system in around on third the time of Windows XP on the same hardware. A thinner taskbar than the previous build had been added to this new build which displayed the time differently.

Milestone 5

The next milestone for Microsoft was Build 4015, which was completed on March 28, 2003 and of course was leaked to internet on 28th April, 2003. Some new feature added to this build was (a) range of parental controls (b) additional configurability for the sidebar and (b) notion of libraries (virtual folders) of files. These libraries collected text or content from around the hard drive and the use could filter the content and save it to his/her desired folder. Initially Microsoft wanted to drop some special shell folder like My Documents, My Music, My Pictures etc., buy these change were dropped after the release of Beta 1 in mid 2005.

At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) conference in May 2003, Microsoft gave their first public demonstrations of the new Desktop Window Manager and Aero. The demonstrations were done on a revised build 4015 which was never released. A number of sessions for developers and hardware engineers at the conference focused on these new features, as well as the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (previously known as "Palladium"), which at the time was Microsoft's proposed solution for creating a secure computing environment whereby any given component of the system could be deemed "trusted". Also at this conference, Microsoft reiterated their roadmap for delivering Longhorn, pointing to an "early 2005" release date.

Build 4028 (build date of July 1 2003) was the first known Server build before Beta 1, and was based on Windows Server.NET RC1, which later became Windows Server 2003. Traditional client bits, such as visual style and look, were present but disabled by default. Build 4029 (build date of June 19 2003), was leaked on September 23 2003. This build contained few of the technologies new to build 4015. Windows Explorer went through a number of other changes. Larger image and video previews were displayed in a tooltip when the mouse hovered over a file, column-level filtering of results was introduced, and overall performance of Explorer was somewhat improved over build 4015, though the memory leak issues were not entirely resolved. There was also a new analog clock user interface. Batch image processing of images was also introduced, making it possible for a user to rotate a number of images at once.

Build 4029's name was displayed as "onghornLay rofessionalPay" (Pig Latin for Longhorn Professional) in various places around the operating system. While some had presumed that screenshots of this build were fake because of this seemingly obvious mistake, Microsoft later explained that this was merely a test of some new code to locate and reduce the number of places in the operating system code that the name was defined.

Milestone 6
Build 4033 (build date of July 17 2003) was similar to 4029, but contained some UI improvements, including an updated Plex theme.
Official PDC 2003 build (build date of October 1, 2003 with a build number of 4051) was not released to the general public, but it did leak on October 20, 2003. It introduced a new Slate theme. Some visual changes included:
Added the Documents folder, for sharing documents with other users.
Added the Photos and Videos folder, for sharing pictures and videos with other users.

My Contacts was replaced by Contacts.
My Computer was replaced by Computer.
My Network Places was replaced by Network Places.
Build 4053 (build date of October 22, 2003) was leaked on March 2 2004 and had some minor changes.

Milestone 7

Build 4074 (build date of April 25 2004) - Official WinHEC 2004 preview build. Leaked in May 2004. This build introduced a new Jade theme, and replaced many XP icons with new Longhorn icons. Also, the font Segoe UI was introduced for the Jade theme.

Build 4083 (build date of May 16 2004) - Leaked on November 10 2004, and was the last leaked 64-bit XP-based build. Both Sidebar and WinFS were dropped from this release. Considered highly unstable, including the absence of programs in the start menu and driver and installation issues.

Build 4093 (build date of August 19 2004) - The last leaked 32-bit XP-based build. Considered highly unstable. Contained Sidebar, WinFS, and an Avalon-based Windows Movie Maker.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

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