Microsoft surprised a lot of people by revealing that a "Longhorn" release of Windows would fall between Windows XP and Blackcomb, the kitchen sink of OSes, which is now expected in 2004-5. But though speculation on Longhorn continues, it"s beginning to see that this is going to be a truly minor release with only small, Windows 98 SE-like change. At a recent Gartner conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed that the truly new stuff was still "two Windows releases away." In other words, Blackcomb will be huge. But Longhorn? I guess we"ll see.
.NET Code Names
You"ve probably heard that the awkwardly named .NET My Services was originally code-named "Hailstorm," but here are a couple of related .NET codenames. The business oriented version of Hailstorm is (still) called "Blizzard," while the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) was originally code-named "Lightning." Anyone seeing a trend here?