Could Avalon be used before Longhorn?

[Lei Jiang]

Could some features in Longhorn run on systems such as Win2000 or WinXP?

Some features such as WinFS is unlikely to run other than Longhorn, but if
Avalon is written purely in managed code, I think maybe it could be used on
Win2000 or WinXP.

 

[Michael Giagnocavo [MVP]]

I doubt it. The managed code will call down to do stuff that's platform
specific. Someone might hack something by taking the longhorn DLLs, but if
I recall correctly, the desktop compositing engine is embedded in the OS
itself, so I don't see much success there. Try in the new avalon
newsgroup...
-mike
MVP

 

[Guest]

By the time you copy across and shoehorn in the longhorn DLLs (along with
its craptivation interdependencies) you could upgrade or move to another OS:

The day QNX gets a runtime is the day I start to seriously use it on the
desktop

 

[Richard Grimes [MVP]]

Could some features in Longhorn run on systems such as Win2000 or
WinXP?

Some features such as WinFS is unlikely to run other than Longhorn,
but if Avalon is written purely in managed code, I think maybe it
could be used on Win2000 or WinXP.

Avalon does not use GDI32 nor GDIPlus, it is a totally different graphics
engine. It also relies on a totally different application model. I would
doubt that you could get Avalon working on a different version of Windows.

Richard

 

[Ed Kaim [MSFT]]

Avalon is the presentation subsystem for Longhorn. It will not be available
for downlevel platforms.