PDC 2003 Wrap-up: Looking back, looking forward
WinNetMag | at | by Mike
With the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003 behind us, it's time for a bit of perspective on what exactly happened, and a look forward to see where the industry is going in the wake of what was arguably the most important event in the history of Windows. At PDC 2003 last week, Microsoft rolled out its first widespread alpha build of Windows "Longhorn," the next major release of its Windows client, and the OS that will supplant Windows XP when it debuts in late 2005 or early 2006. The Longhorn PDC release--build 4051--features an XP-style theme that visually resembles the company's current thinking for Longhorn's user experience (UX), codenamed "Aero," the low-level "Avalon" graphics presentation capabilities, a .NET-based Web services infrastructure dubbed "Indigo," a new storage engine built on NTFS and SQL Server called "WinFS" (Windows Future Storage), and a new .NET-based set of programming interfaces called WinFX.