As you must already know, Microsoft’s next-generation Windows which has been code-named Longhorn has been making lot of waves. They’ve been making lot of innovative strides in this Longhorn and they have a lot of cool names for many of Longhorn components as well.

One important thing to note about Longhorn is that it is completely based on .NET. All the Longhorn APIs will be in .NET and hence .NET can soon become the preferred development platform. This is my case for pushing Mono to become the preferred  development platform as well since (atleast theoretically) Mono programs will be cross-platform and will run on .NET and Longhorn as well.

Coming back to Longhorn, I was reading some fascinating articles today:

• Avalon graphics model
• WinFX
• Bloghorn: A Blog Reader Built in XAML
• ObjectSpaces – a new convenient way of accessing databases
• The Official Microsoft Longhorn website
• System.Help
• Longhorn Screenshots
• Longhorn Roadmap for Avalon
• Indigo – The Longhorn Communication subsystem
• WinFS – The Longhorn Storage subsystem

I’ve been completely bowled over by all these articles. I just had to add LonghornBlogs.com to my list of feeds on my Bloglines account!

Looking from the open source angle, does Linux/FreeBSD/KDE/GNOME/…. have anything to match Longhorn? I personally feel that they can’t match Longhorn yet, maybe Mono will counter that in future but I can confidently say that only when Mono developers are innovating and not just playing catch-up with the Longhorn people. Of course, there is still time till 2006!

This reminds me of a joke I read somewhere on Slashdot:

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?

Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?

BSD (which also means OS X): Are you guys coming or what?!?