Good olde Paul has updated his The Road to Windows "Longhorn" article with information from the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2002, which was held April 15-18, 2002!
In this update he dispells one rumor that was flying around regarding a new 3D User Interface... Well here"s what paul has managed to cobble together from info at the WinHEC held recently.
- There were rumors of a new 3D user interface for Longhorn. The rumors can be explained, of course.
They started because Microsoft quietly published a set of documents, aimed at hardware developers, that included some low-level information about the graphics requirements for Longhorn systems. Someone saw a blurb about DirectX 9.x being an underlying part of the Longhorn UI, remembered the Microsoft Research 3D UI project called Task Gallery, put two and two together, and... came up snake eyes.
The truth is that Microsoft is simply improving the quality of its existing Windows XP-based graphics architecture, and not moving to a totally new way of doing things. Windows XP debuted with GDI+ 1.0, the successor to the GDI (Graphics Device Interface) graphics subsystem used by previous Windows versions. Longhorn will include GDI+ 2.0 (or 1.x, depending on what they name it), and not a new graphics engine.