Microsoft starts to Talk about Longhorn again
Microsoft has started to talk up Longhorn again, so they must be getting more confident as we move towards the release of the beta. Here are some of the main articles and interviews, and my extracts and observations. My overall observation is that these articles show a very feature driven view of Longhorn. Not at all the experience driven vision that was presented at the 2003 PDC. Hopefully this is just because Microsoft are only talking about specific features they feel confident to discuss right now. As the whole Longhorn wave of Operating System, Office tools and third party applications begin to be talked about we will see a real step forward in the user experience. However I don’t think we will really see the vision until we see the client and server vision coming together and by that I mean.
- Longhorn Client and Longhorn Server
- Office Client and Office Server
- WinFS Client and WinFS server and a WinFS integrated SharePoint Server
- Longhorn Client Security integrated with the federated and peer group security features we see glimerings of with ADFS and Groove
- Office Communicator and Live Communications Server extended with Groove like peer group collaboration
- Groove like capabilities built into …
Thanks to a great deal 
on eBay I now have a brand new TC1100 with 1.5GB of memory and my 
I have mentioned before that I live in St Annes on the Sea, a small town that enjoys a micro-climate. Well it was forecast snow today, but for us it has been a lovely sunny day, which is lucky because it’s market day and what a market it was! Today we had a speciality continental market, very expensive but a visual delight!
Yesterday I was working on the business case for wireless PDAs and Smart Phones for my companies senior exec’s, probably VPs and above. I found it pretty enlightening. I am not going to share the business case, but I did have a few interesting observations to share:
Inspired by listening to talks about the Microsoft Research project, 
I have just upgraded all of my servers and everything seems to be working fine except for skype. When I click on the Contacts Tab the contact list is not reliably displayed. If I close skype and then open it again then it is displayed once, but from then on the tab changes to show focus, but the actual contact list area continues to show the content of the previous tab (whatever that was). In the screen shot I have attached you can see that contacts tab has focus, but the start screen is displayed.
Today in our little town we were celebrating the fact that after much campaigning we now have our own town council which gives us a more effective voice at the Borough Council, celebrations were mainly of a musical nature, and this picture is of one of the local bands. The town was buzzing, helped by the fact that its was a gloriously sunny day. We walked home along the beach playing football, which regular readers will know means that physically I am on pretty good form today.
In recent years we have seen a lot of money spent on appropriate development, which has successful regenerated the town centre and this year we are hoping to see further investment in our promenade gardens and in our town centre park. This picture is of my mum and the kids in one of the beach side cafes.
On Saturday I started to pull up all of the strawberry plants that had rooted from runners last year. I ended up with several hundred plants in a big heap. I decided that it would be a good idea to give them away, but my wife thought no one would be interested. I took this as a bit of a challenge, I am one of those people who likes to think the best of others (which is an extension of having a positive outlook) my wife in contrast always expects things to go wrong and tends to distrust those she doesn’t know. Anyway I bagged the plants up – 15 plants to a bag – and to make the challenge more interesting decided to give the plants away but allow for donations.