The Experience Longhorn Project on Microsoft Longhorn

Post-reset Longhorn builds (roughly 5048 through early 5308) often die on modern hardware with BlInitializeLibrary failed 0xc0000017 — STATUS_NO_MEMORY — even when the machine clearly has RAM to spare.

In Longhorn build 4008, DCE was broken and attempting to start DCE would trigger a crash within UXDeskSB.exe.

DCE (Desktop Composition Engine) is the component of Longhorn responsible for rendering the desktop and all windows using the GPU (unlike previous versions that relied on the CPU).

After the painful experience of repeatedly changing names during the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 development cycles, Microsoft decided to introduce a common, global branding API into Longhorn.

Thanks to Lucas Brooks for letting me use his post from BetaArchive.

A couple of years ago, I put together a sample tile written in .NET 1.1 / Visual Studio 2003 for Longhorn build 3683.

“protoPlex” was a project that ran during 2008, organised by Thomas Hounsell and overlapping heavily with the Longhorn 08 team.

Driver Packages These packages are some extracted drivers from the VMWare Guest Additions.

Reading up on Longhorn’s development process, and you’ll read a lot about how the shell or user interface was redeveloped using the .NET Framework, and many people infer that this meant using C#, including a number of Microsoft employees.

A big new thing in Longhorn were the tasks and help topics integrated into Explorer.

At the time of the major reset in late 2004, Windows Server 2003 SP1 RC (Release Candidate) was the latest official Windows product.

Here’s just a funny tidbit I found some time ago to keep you guys entertained.

I’m on some sort of “write down all the things” spree, documenting things I’ve found in the past, but never properly have written down here on longhorn.ms.

In this post I will have a look at how one can unlock the “full potential” of the wizard - to lift a corner of the veil: it doesn’t have a lot of potential.

A lot of people have been struggling to get Aero to work in build 4074.

In this tutorial you will find everything you need to enable desktop compositing on the Longhorn builds that support it.

The RMA test tile already caused some discussion in the past and nobody has since figured out what it’s purpose is.

Longhorn build 3683 is the earliest of all Longhorn builds we have access to, dating back to September 2002.

In this third part of the Hacking Avalon series, we are taking a closer look at the process of making an Avalon application.

Multiple patents were filed by Microsoft for this sensational effect.

Often times people are confused to hear Longhorn was based off of Windows Server 2003.

When using Longhorn, it’s a must to known how to manually install drivers in Windows.

The original leak of Longhorn build 4093 from within Microsoft was broken and uninstallable.

Always wanted to experiment with Avalon on Windows XP?

This is the first post in a series that I’ll be doing.

Here it is. 6 minutes of Hillel Cooperman introducing Longhorn to the public during Bill Gates’ keynote on 27 October 2003 at PDC ‘03 in Los Angeles.

Most of you will probably be aware of some hidden view options available throughout the Longhorn builds.

At Microsoft, it is common practice to use products still under development to continue development of that very product.

This is the very first page in its kind; a tips ’n tricks page.

This quick introduction to hex was originally to be part of another article, but became quite long and therefore I decided to separate it.

Ever looked at a Windows build list and wondered what all those different tags mean?

While exploring Longhorn builds you might have noticed these weird spelling mistakes in the Windows branding like; “onghornLay rofessionalPay” and wondered whether one of the developers had a breakdown while typing this.

Aurora is one of the eye-candy features which is best represented in Milestone 7 builds.

A significant part of pre-reset Longhorn’s new UI sits on the .NET Framework.

Run Microsoft’s Windows “Longhorn” today using these activation cracks for each build.

With the new image-based installation introduced in Milestone 4 it was also time for a revamped out-of-box experience (OOBE) wizard.

At WinHEC 2003 Microsoft revealed that Longhorn would be build from the ground up from a list of components.

If you ever bothered to take a look at one of the 64-bit Longhorn compiles, you may have noticed that most of these builds are extremely empty and lack, as one example, the sidebar.

The “My TV and Movies” library becomes visible when using the Media Center Edition (“Freestyle”) variant of some Longhorn builds.

There are two distinct “new” display control panels developed prior to the Longhorn reset.

In many Longhorn builds, there are issues with partitioning and formatting disks within the installer.

The Longhorn Start page is a feature present in Milestone 3 and early Milestone 4 builds.

One common problem faced by people installing Longhorn on modern hardware is the apparent inability to boot from USB drives.