Read chapter 6 of Introducing Longhorn for Developers, where Brent dives into the Indigo pillar of Longhorn, including an architectural overview, programming web services, programming remote objects, securing Indigo endpoints, reliable and durable messages and transactions.

Thomas Rizzo, Director (!) on the SQL Server Product Management team, kicks off his WinFS column with an overview of why we need it and what it is. I always love the first piece in any column, as it sets the grounding information for what readers are going to need to understand reading future pieces. I especially love them from internal folks, as it really gives a flavor of what the product team (WinFS, in this case), had in mind that drove them to build their thing the way they did. Check it out.

Here. If you're a C++ programmer and have questions or concerns about where C++ is going in Longhorn, you need to be at this chat on Monday, 3/15 from 11a - 12:30p PST.

I'm just happy to see security + Windows = good for a change. : )

Yasser Shohoud digs into Indigo even further, this month using “channels” to build different kinds of message exchange patterns into your applications, including one-way, duplex (incoming and outgoing messages on different ports) and request/reply, as well as adding reliability.

Here.

Josh Williams, an SDE on the CLR team, kicks off his 64-bit blog with an introduction to WOW64 and what it means for .NET programmers. Here’s the summary:

• WOW64 isn’t the OS per se, but a subset of the Win64 OS which enables a 32bit application to run inside of a 32bit process on a 64bit OS while using 32bit system dlls and such.
• Whidbey CLR will include both 32bit and 64bit versions, both of which will be installed on 64bit machines. This allows both 32bit and 64bit managed applications to run in bitness correct native process depending on how the assemblies are tagged at compile time.
• Once a process is started up as either 32bit or 64bit all of the dlls/assemblies that are loaded into that process have to be compatible with that bitness.
• If you have a 32bit managed app which has dependencies on 32bit unmanaged code then you’ll need to either find a 64bit version of the unmanaged code or tag your managed app as x86 at compile time to make sure that you don’t float up to a native 64bit process. This will result in you having to live with your process running under the WOW64.

Paul Thurrott finishes his 2-part series of interviews of Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek, Longhorn User Experience mavens. The interview covers just how hard it is to make an entire OS usable and just how much work MS does to get it right.

However, one thing that Hillel said struck me particularly as someone fairly new to working at MS:

“Actually, that was the shocking thing about coming here: The problems weren’t simple. The number of people that I met who were humble, that cared deeply and passionately about making the user experience better for customers and weren’t just saying, ‘Hey, here’s a new API’–not that I don’t love a new API–was surprising. These people were really deeply concerned about how they could make customers’ lives better and had thought a lot about this, way more than I had. I was blown away. I just couldn’t believe it.”

That’s exactly how I felt coming to MS. We have a PR problem, but we definately do not have a care-about-the-customer problem.

Paul Thurrott is more of a user guy then a developer guy, but you have to be a user before you can be a developer, and his stuff is often interesting. Now he’s created a spot on his site to gather his Longhorn content. My only question: where’s the dang RSS feed?!?