Some very naughty person indeed has leaked an alpha build of Longhorn to the net. There’s an interesting summary here of what seems to be in it. After (obviously) the “softer” watercolour UI and animated My Documents icon, the most interesting features for me are the Avalon API and the WinFS file system.
Avalon is described as “an XML-based successor to the Win32 API”. I dunno. Sounds like SOAP or XML-RPC. Maybe there’s just one function with a couple of XMLDOCDocument* parameters, or something.
WinFS apparently allows SQL-Server to take over NTFS’s role as the OS’s base-level storage subsystem. That is, all your files are stored inside a SQL-Server database, and NTFS is just a legacy API into that database. This strange inversion was apparently first reported here, but I remember Jon Honeyball mentioning this idea at least a year before that in DNJ magazine. I can’t find the article, though…
Frankly, my mind boggles at this. Files as objects in a Yukon-type DBMS that’s acting as a sub-system of the OS and hosting the .NET CLR? I guess that’s one way to integrate .NET into the OS, but I’d really appreciate a block-structure diagram of this stuff to understand the dependencies. And what about the ability to write stored procedures in C#, VB.NET, etc? Would that subsume what we currently think of as operating system scripting? Yikes.