Latest about Longhorn

John Carroll over at ZDNet has posted, IMHO one of the best overviews of Longhorn to date coming off of last weeks PDC.

Here are some good quotes from the article:

“I’ve noticed before that it is much easier to create reasonably complex user interfaces in HTML than in WIN32. For instance, it’s far easier to write a “skinnable” web site than it is to write a “skinnable” WIN32 application. Granted, you could do practically anything you wanted in WIN32, but if you wanted to escape the look and feel imposed by WIN32 controls, you had to perform a bunch of programming gymnastics.”

“Avalon is a complete upgrade to the process of writing Windows applications. In a way, Avalon turns Windows development into a more advanced and feature-rich version of web-style development. This constitutes more than just a conceptual similarity. One of the means by which Longhorn applications can be consumed is by accessing them from a web server using a browser (obviously, Internet Explorer), causing them to run within a “sandbox” managed by the .NET runtime. These downloadable applications act like more functional web pages, as they have access to the full set of rich user interface controls offered as part of the Longhorn operating system. Longhorn also makes it easy to integrate common web-paradigm concepts into desktop applications, such as page forward / page back logic, and “page history” functionality.”