Windows Vista – Post 5

Development of Windows Vista in Mid-2004 to Mid-2005 (Part D)

I was quite busy so I could not come to post since last week. This post is the part of the series I have stated about “Windows Vista”.

As the time was moving on its wheels and delay in the release of Windows Vista, it made a click on the memories of Vista team that they are losing sight for what it needed to release to the world. Some of the members of vista team started to describe Longhorn as “Cairo.NET” project , which never resulted in shipping (But ended with Windows 95 and Windows NT.)

On the front page of the “The Wall Street Journal”, on September 23, 2005 an article published in which some of the answers had been given which had been interview to Jim Allchin, Microsoft Co-president. He was the person who was responsible for the development of Vista. But the answers were not sufficient to focus on the subject “when the development will end”.

Allchin had to decide the next step. In the last of month of 2003 Allchin added two other senior Brain Valentine and Amitabh Srivatava to his team, former experienced with shipping software at Microsoft, most notably Windows Server 2003 and the other spent his career in researching and developing methods of producing high-quality testing systems.

A new team was build by Amitabh Srivatava who started to map-out the Windows Operating System. At that time most skilled engineers and developers were working on Windows Server 2003. It was decided to reset the development of Longhorn, building on the same code which was being used for Windows Server 2003, instead of Windows XP and the decision was announced to Microsoft employees on August 26, 2006.

Longhorn "D1"

Build 5000: As it was decided that the next code for the development of Vista would be the same coder used for Windows Server 2003, was in use. Build 5000, was the first build based on Server 2003 code-based, and completion date was September 8, 2004. But he interface was Windows XP.

Build 5048 (built on April 1 2005) was the official WinHEC 2005 preview build, described as the Longhorn Developer Preview, and made available to WinHEC attendees on April 24 2005. It was the only build from this time period that was made available by Microsoft; it was not officially distributed outside of WinHEC, but the build quickly appeared on file sharing networks. The Aero visual style made its first appearance in this build, and the Desktop Window Manager was present but disabled and hidden by default. At the keynote presentation, Bill Gates also announced that many of the WinFX developer APIs that were originally planned exclusively for Longhorn were going to be backported to Windows XP and Server 2003, and that the final user interface for Windows would not be seen for a while longer. Other features such as device-independent resolutions, rasterized icons, virtual folders, and registry virtualization were discussed as well.

Build 5048's closer resemblance to Windows XP than to the prior Longhorn builds from 2003 surprised many, leading well-known Windows enthusiast Paul Thurrott to write: "My thoughts are not positive, not positive at all. This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves. This has the makings of a train wreck." Months later, Thurrott stated that the Vista development process has since recovered in the more recent builds.