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About Our Office
features
Several other features originally planned for Windows Vista, such as the Monad
Shell and WinFS are also expected to be part of "Vienna", though they may be
released independently when they are finished.
"Vienna" will also feature the "sandboxed" approach discussed during the
Alpha/White Box development phase for Longhorn. All non-managed code will run in
a sandboxed environment where access to the "outside world" is restricted by the
operating system. Access to raw sockets will be disabled from within the
sandbox, as will direct access to the file system, hardware abstraction layer
(HAL), and complete memory addressing. All access to outside applications,
files, and protocols will be regulated by the operating system, and any
malicious activity will be halted immediately. If this approach is successful,
it bodes very well for security and safety, as it is virtually impossible for a
malicious application to cause any damage to the system if it is locked in what
is effectively a glass box.
Another interesting feature mentioned by Bill Gates is a pervasive typing line
that will recognize the sentence that you're typing in. The implications of this
could be as simple as a "complete as you type" function as found in most modern
search engines,( i.e. Google Suggest [2] or as complex as being able to give
verbal commands to the PC without any concern for syntax.[3]
Backward compatibility
An announcement was recently made that "Vienna" will be available in both 32-bit
and 64-bit versions, in order to ease the industry's transition from 32-bit to
64-bit computing. Vienna was previously expected to support only 64-bit server
systems. This will mean continued backwards compatibility with 32-bit
applications, but 16-bit (MS-DOS) applications are unlikely to be supported.
This is a notable break, as Windows line of products has been known throughout
its history for backwards compatibility.
The announcement referred to above was made prior to the decision to push back
production of Vienna and release Microsoft Windows Vista (formerly code named
Longhorn) as an intermediate product.
Internal sources pitch Vienna as being not just a major revision of Windows, but
a complete departure from the way we have typically thought about interacting
with a computer. While Windows Vista is intended to be a technologies-based
release, with some added UI sparkle (in the form of the Aero set of technologies
and guidelines), Vienna is targeted directly at revolutionizing the way we
interact with our home and office PCs.
For instance, the "Start" philosophy, introduced in Windows 95, may be
completely replaced by the "new interface" which was said in 1999 to be
scheduled for "Vienna", before being moved to the Longhorn project, and then
back to "Vienna".
The Explorer shell will be replaced in its entirety, with features such as the
taskbar being replaced by a new concept based on the last 10 years of R&D at the
Microsoft "VIBE" research lab. Projects such as GroupBar and LayoutBar are
expected to make an appearance, allowing users to more effectively manage and
keep track of their applications and documents while in use, and a new way of
launching applications is expected - among other ideas, Microsoft is
investigating a pie menu-type circular interface, similar in function to the
dock in Mac OS X.
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