User:Robobox/Sandbox

Initially, Microsoft intended to succeed Windows XP with a major release codenamed Blackcomb. However, during the development of Windows XP, Microsoft realized that the planned feature set of Blackcomb would be far too large to reasonably implement in one release cycle. This led to them deciding to produce an interim release, codenamed Longhorn, to bridge the gap between XP and Blackcomb. The Longhorn codename is a reference to the bar between the mountains Whistler (the namesake of the codename of Windows XP) and Blackcomb in British Columbia, Canada.

Feature planning for a post-XP interim release, then referred to as Whistler+1 (this name continued to be used in some planning documents after the Longhorn codename was introduced, and it is stated in PX6977 from the Comes v. Microsoft case that Longhorn was the formal name for Whistler+1), was under way as early as January 2001. 

Planning for the Longhorn project started in earnest in May 2001. Three main pillars of Longhorn were planned: WinFS, a subsystem that aimed to bring benefits of relational databases to filesystem storage; Avalon, a new vector-based user interface framework (later known as Windows Presentation Foundation); and Indigo (later known as Windows Communication Foundation). These fell under the umbrella of WinFX (later .NET Framework 3.0), a new series of class libraries building on the .NET Framework.  

Many features slated for Blackcomb became part of Longhorn, and employees jumped ship from other parts of the company, with Longhorn quickly turning into a much larger project than originally intended. After an initially quiet development cycle, the first build to publicly leak onto the Internet was build 3683, containing a new theme called Plex, early versions of Avalon and WinFS, alongside a new user interface element called the Sidebar, derived from the Microsoft Research project SideShow.

Starting with build 4000 and Milestone 4, Microsoft employed a new image-based deployment mechanism for Longhorn, known as WIM, designed to make installs (run from a Windows PE environment) far faster than the CAB-based installs of before. WIM would later be deployed not only for Longhorn and subsequent versions of Windows, but also for later embedded versions of Windows XP including Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs and Windows Embedded 2009.  

As development progressed, the Longhorn project ended up becoming a largely bloated and unstable piece of vaporware, with release dates being pushed back on several occasions. Stability issues (e.g.: memory leaks and system crashes), organizational management problems (such as lack of team morale and an unworkable build lab system) and feature creep, additionally compounded by the significant lack of work done to optimize the operating system and the use of relatively new or otherwise unfinished technologies - many system components of which were extended by the .NET Framework, Avalon and Managed C++ - increasingly became issues as development progressed, and the project entered development hell.  

Due to these problems, only two preview releases were publicly distributed at conferences and to developers: builds 4051 and 4074, released during PDC 2003 and WinHEC 2004 (at which point the new Longhorn Display Driver Model was announced) respectively. Around the time of PDC 2003, Win32 was said to be in "maintenance mode", with Microsoft intending to keep it around solely for compatibility, with few new APIs exposed to developers; the Longhorn Developer Previews focused solely on managed APIs.  

Slides from an internal Longhorn presentation dated February 2004, outlining the rapidly deteriorating state of the project. Employee morale in the lead-up to the development reset was at an all-time low, with some under the belief that the Longhorn project, the core issues of which were impossible to fix, could still be able to ship.

As a last resort, Microsoft started work on refactoring the operating system into a set of components (something which had been planned early on but Microsoft had not made serious progress on prior to this point), hoping to contain the feature creep in the process. However, the componentization effort derailed the project even more. The last confirmed build prior to the development reset is build 4093 (main), compiled on 19 August 2004, although it is likely that some build labs and teams continued building parts of the scrapped pre-reset Longhorn source tree after this time, and some components (such as DWM, which shares a dependency on MIL with Avalon) are likely to have survived the reset unscathed.  

Development reset

The last known build of Longhorn prior to its infamous development reset was build 4093 (main), widely regarded as a breaking point for the project. Development restarted from scratch on 19 August 2004, moving to a work-in-progress version of the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase as its base build. Early development reset builds were compiled from as early as 3 August 2004.

Approximately four hours after build 4093 was compiled, Microsoft reset the development of Longhorn and started fresh by using a work-in-progress version of the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase. The immediate post-reset builds, codenamed "Omega-13" (after the Galaxy Quest time travel device)[4]  were primarily focused on componentization and reintegration of features from pre-reset builds while maintaining stability. A ban on usage of the .NET Framework was imposed across a large majority of the Windows source tree with the exception of the Windows Media Center. Most of these builds are similar to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 in overall look and feel, although markers such as poorly-edited branding (as observed in builds such as 5001) were temporarily utilized to distinguish from its predecessor. Few builds from this stage of development have been released, officially or otherwise. Development of Longhorn continued, although many features originally slated for inclusion (such as WinFS and Castles) were delayed and/or ultimately dropped in order to produce a more realistic set of goals for the operating system.  

Little is known about the period between August 2004 and April 2005, also dubbed "D1" or "Milestone 9", during which time Microsoft tried to get development back on track, but it is known that Microsoft continued to work on WinFX (shipping previews for Windows XP and Server 2003 starting in November 2004 and available to the general public from January 2005), and additionally distributed builds to core partners such as ATI and Nvidia (as evidenced by a December 2004 ATI presentation mentioning Longhorn, and the presence of LDDM drivers in build 5048). It is also during this period that Microsoft began development on Internet Explorer 7. After the release of IE 6 in August 2001, Microsoft largely ceased development of Internet Explorer, opting instead to simply maintain it while Mozilla and other competitors crept ahead. IE 7 became a headline feature of Longhorn and was first announced at the RSA conference in February 2005.  

A preliminary developer preview build was released to attendees of the WinHEC 2005 conference on 25 April 2005[5] for hardware developers, which also demonstrably proved to be significantly more stable over previous builds, despite many raising concerns over the then-current state of the operating system's lacking feature set at the time. DirectX 10 (initially known as Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0) was also announced at WinHEC 2005. Beta 1, build 5112, was soon released to beta testers, and MSDN and TechNet subscribers on 27 July 2005, demonstrating much progress compared to the build Microsoft released at WinHEC 2005, and including the first intended public release of an early version of the Windows Aero user interface. Over the course of the rest of 2005 and 2006, many builds were released to testers through the Community Technology Preview program; and on 6 June 2006, Microsoft released Windows Vista Beta 2 to the general public. They would continue to release builds to the public over the next few months, with the final pre-RTM build released to the public being  Release Candidate 2 (build 5744). The RTM build was build 6000.16386, compiled on 1 November 2006 and released to manufacturing on 8 November 2006. The operating system finally reached general availability on 30 January 2007, met with increasingly negative consumer reception in part due to significant mismanagement in the Windows Vista Capable program (itself the subject of a class-action lawsuit,[6] later downgraded to civil-action[7]) and hardware manufacturers not having confidence in Microsoft's ability to ship a new operating system release in time.[8]  

Post-release

Microsoft released the first service pack for Windows Vista in March 2008 in the form of a major update to the RTM build, which was additionally complemented by a stand-alone installable update package, adding support for UEFI firmware on 64-bit versions of Windows alongside added support for the exFAT file system and improvements to performance, stability, and wireless capabilities.  

In May 2009, Microsoft released the second service pack for Windows Vista, which includes various new features such as wireless and Bluetooth support; most notably, a Bluetooth Control Panel applet; it also includes Windows Search 4.0 built-in, better support of eSATA drives, support for burning on Blu-ray discs and support for the x64 VIA Nano processor, and also improved performance of the RSS feeds sidebar gadget, and improved streaming high-definition content. Another update, known as the Platform Update for Windows Vista, was later released in October 2009, and backports several APIs from Windows 7, including the Automation and Ribbon APIs, and DirectX 11.0 and related technologies, such as WDDM 1.1, DXGI 1.1, Direct2D, and DirectWrite.