Windows Vista: The Inside Story

How an unexpected setback brought about a new era for your PC – and for Microsoft.

The road to the final release of Windows Vista has not always been a smooth one. The lowest point came when the head of Windows development, Jim Allchin – probably Bill Gates’ most trusted senior lieutenant at Microsoft – told him that development on the successor to Windows XP had effectively ground to a halt. Gates didn’t know whether to be furious or just traumatised. In a later interview published in the Wall Street Journal, Allchin says he told Gates, “It’s not going to work”. Even coming from the man who’s seen by many as the guiding father of Windows, Gates found the news hard to believe.

The weather matched the fevered behind-the-scenes activity. In Microsoft’s normally-temperate home city of Seattle, throughout July and August 2004 heatwaves followed muggy spells as Gates argued that the project just needed more time. Behind closed doors, he also held conversations with senior software architects, but in the end Gates agreed on the need to start building the new operating system from scratch. It was the most traumatic point in the development of Longhorn, the codename for the program that was eventually to become Windows Vista, and it changed the way that Microsoft operates. In short, software development became a team game rather than a somewhat chaotic competition between programmers.

Behind the scenes

Visitors to the company’s Redmond Campus generally come away with a feeling of almost unnatural order. Even the grass between the buildings seems controlled to the point where it maintains a uniform height without a lawnmower in sight. But underneath the apparently regimented academic exterior was often barely organised chaos. The celebration of this culture peaked in an internal Microsoft documentary, which portrayed software engineers as heroes as they battled to beat seemingly impossible odds to get Windows XP out on time.

By the time Windows XP did make it out of the door in October 2001, Allchin’s mind was on other things – in May of that year work had started on Longhorn. This was expected to follow the trajectory that had worked so successfully for Microsoft, to the point where its operating systems run well over 90 per cent of the world’s personal computers. The basis of Microsoft’s popularity is ‘bundling’. Without it an operating system is a vital, but not hugely interesting, piece of software, which manages the hardware and software resources of a computer, such as controlling input and output devices, allocating memory and managing files. There’s never been a firm definition that puts a boundary on what can be included, but before Windows came along you couldn’t have much fun with an operating system on its own. Now it’s taken for granted that the operating system will be bundled with a host of functions and programs, such as games, a web browser, a media player, security software and rudimentary word processing.

Making old work with new

Another reason for Microsoft’s continuing success is the way it always makes a huge effort to ensure that any piece of software or hardware that worked with an old operating system will still function with a new one. Not every company does this. For instance, when Apple launched OS X, it ditched much of its so-called ‘legacy’. Many original programs simply wouldn’t work any more. So in 2001 the Microsoft developers who were starting to look at the projected Longhorn operating system had to somehow incorporate the 40 million lines of code that made up Windows XP, or at least include the functions that the code performed. In software engineering, that often means sticking to the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. That’s partly why programs tend to get more and more bloated. But, along with the Windows XP code, there was a whole lot more “cool stuff”, as Microsoft likes to call it, that also needed to be added to its new operating system. Combining the demands of the old and new makes each version of Windows more advanced than the last, and Longhorn was no exception.

At first, it was developed fairly quietly and out of sight. But with thousands of engineers working for Microsoft, and many more interested people on the internet, nothing in the company stays secret for long. This is particularly true when an operating system is being developed. In order to test the components, they’re all put together in a ‘build’. Some builds are only intended for internal use, while others are handed out at developers’ conferences and so on. The latter usually turn up on the internet within hours of their appearance in delegates’ packs, and even the frequently flaky and unstable internal builds tend to show up online as well.

So it was that the first relatively public sighting of the new operating system came in September 2002, when it appeared on the internet under the name Longhorn XP Professional. Indeed, to the untrained eye it looked very similar to Windows XP. It was, however, the first time that the Windows Sidebar had been seen. Designed to be shown on the right-hand side of the screen, but dockable elsewhere, the original idea was that it should replace the System Tray area, but that was later dropped.

This build also included an implementation of one of Bill Gates’ pet projects, WinFS or Windows Future Storage. Intended to reduce the need for the proliferation of proprietary file types while speeding up file retrieval, it had been conceived in the 1990s, but never made it into a finished product. It was a trend that was to continue; WinFS was removed from Windows Vista in late 2006.

Faster, better graphics

Probably the most important development in this early version of Longhorn could be seen in the Display Properties Control Panel. This made use of a new graphical display system codenamed Avalon – which we now know as Windows Presentation Foundation. It increases the range of graphics that can be displayed and speeds them up. By November 2002, the new graphical user interface (GUI) Aero had made its first appearance. Nobody now seems sure whether this is an acronym or a ‘backronym’. In other words, they can’t remember which came first: Aero or the words that give the initial letters to the name. Either way, Microsoft now says it stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open.

The development of Aero has continued for at least the last four years, although it has sometimes disappeared from the builds to be temporarily replaced by the Windows XP interface. Microsoft has always insisted that Aero is more than cosmetic eye candy, pointing to the fact that it’s the first complete graphical revision since Windows 95, covering buttons, task dialogues, wizards, common dialogues, control panels, icons, fonts, user notifications and even the tone of text used.

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, groups of Microsoft engineers added functions to the new operating system. There were dramatic changes in appearance: the sidebar developed slowly before being unceremoniously dropped, new parental controls were included, along with integration of a new secure-computing environment formerly known as Palladium. And there was a growing focus on security; Microsoft was seeing a steadily growing increase in attacks on its software, and in 2002 Bill Gates announced a new focus on ‘Trustworthy Computing’ – henceforth, in any choice between adding new features and securing what was there, security would win. It had a knock-on delay on Longhorn: a big chunk of the staff got pulled off to work on the high-security Service Pack 2 for Windows XP.

New ways of working

Although to Microsoft outsiders development appeared to be continuing as normal – if somewhat slowly – behind the scenes there were some problems. Some engineers were describing Longhorn as ‘Cairo.NET’, in reference to an enormous 1990s project that never saw the light of day, although most of its elements did surface later in Windows 95 and Windows NT. To get Longhorn back on track, developers were pulled in from Windows Server 2003 and a more structured way of working was introduced. Some employees weren’t happy and even Bill Gates reportedly resisted the changes, which were seen as liable to stifle creativity.

“It was all just, ‘Hey, bless this process’, which I was unwilling to do,” Gates later told the Wall Street Journal. “They’re just talking about process and I’m frustrated we’re not talking about how the teams are responding to it.” His fears seemed justified when the Longhorn Developer Preview was handed out to developers in April 2005. What they saw seemed to be a step back towards Windows XP.

Looking good

But then in July that same year came the name change to Windows Vista and the first beta test. It looked completely different. In came virtual folders, new high-resolution icons, new search and Windows Explorer interfaces. Under the skin were the promised new networking and audio stacks, parental controls, and a working build of .NET Framework 3.0.

A series of new builds started to appear under the banner Community Technology Preview. Most contained small changes to tidy up minor problems, but some demonstrated substantial developments. The Windows Sidebar reappeared and Microsoft Gadgets was introduced. Then came the public release of Windows Vista Beta 2, which was probably the largest software download event in history, nearly caused a disaster. “If we increased our bandwidth any further,” a Microsoft representative said at the time “there’s a possibility of taking down the internet…” At the same time, Microsoft was looking to get genuinely demanding feedback, none greater than when it sponsored and invited hackers to test their skills at August’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Almost inevitably, a headline from the event read: “Vista hacked at Black Hat.” What actually happened was a Polish researcher managed to insert malicious code to bypass the Windows Vista security – but she’d only done it after User Account Protection had been switched off. This lead some to suggest that this was akin to ‘hiding’ a house key under the doormat, then complaining the building’s security was inadequate when it got broken into. Demonstrations like these are more than just a marketing ploy. The unprecedented scale of testing has led to Microsoft making numerous changes to Windows Vista, anything from improvements in speed and performance to the inclusion of a check box that enables users to switch off the startup tune.

By the end of August 2006, Windows Vista had reached Release Candidate 1, with nearly all the features nailed down and only a few last tweaks remaining. The final moment occurs when Windows Vista “goes gold” and is released to the world’s manufacturing plants for the discs to be pressed in their millions.