Recent content in 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. The message is misleading; the real story is stranger. Here’s how that was chased down, and a small patch for bootmgr / winload.exe that fixes it.
In Longhorn build 4008, DCE was broken and attempting to start DCE would trigger a crash within UXDeskSB.exe . This would also break theming, which was also provided by themesrv.dll in the same process. In this article, we look into the root cause of the failure, and how a patch to winlogon.exe can fix it by changing the launch context of UxDeskSB.exe to be more robust and explicit.
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). In Longhorn build 3706, DCE was broken, causing BSODs when attempting to activate it on real hardware, though it did work in certain versions of VMWare.
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. The foundations of this system are present right from build 3683.
A couple of years ago, I put together a sample tile written in .NET 1.1 / Visual Studio 2003 for Longhorn build 3683. This sample tile simply reads the current OS Version from Environment.OSVersion .
Thanks to Lucas Brooks for letting me use his post from BetaArchive . 
 I did a bit of research on Longhorn’s theme format, and figured out some things perhaps never fully documented before. I wrote a .msstyles decompiler, that can turn compiled packthem v4 themes into .INIs and resources (like Windows XP themes).
“protoPlex” was a project that ran during 2008, organised by Thomas Hounsell and overlapping heavily with the Longhorn 08 team. The aim was to build on a Longhorn build 3718 base, and develop some early plex concepts demonstrated by Microsoft.
Driver Packages 
 These packages are some extracted drivers from the VMWare Guest Additions. The tools themselves are not compatible with Longhorn, although the drivers themselves maintained compatibility for much longer.
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. This has then been blamed for the poor performance of Longhorn and in particular, is often cited as the cause for its numerous memory leaks.
A big new thing in Longhorn were the tasks and help topics integrated into Explorer. Many builds show an empty space where these tasks would go in Explorer’s task pane, but no tasks are showing. In this post I’ll describe the step-by-step process of getting these tasks to work on build 4042. The idea is that we go from an empty pane to a nice and completely filled pane like in the…
At the time of the major reset in late 2004, Windows Server 2003 SP1 RC (Release Candidate) was the latest official Windows product. This version served as the foundation for rebuilding the operating system.
Here’s just a funny tidbit I found some time ago to keep you guys entertained. In an interview on Channel9 , Robert Scoble asks a designer on the Windows team, Jenny Lam some questions about Vista and how its coming up Channel9. During the interview the following comes up on the subject of wallpapers:
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. Today I’d like to have a brief look at this unidentified build.
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. If you can vaguely remember me writing about exactly this subject a few years back… you are right, but with the switch to the WordPress powered website I totally forgot to place the original article back so here I am…
A lot of people have been struggling to get Aero to work in build 4074. In this post I want to show you how Aero can be enabled along with a little history. If you came here looking for information about Aurora, please see my post about Aurora & Aero .
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. This hidden tile for the sidebar in builds 4008 and up has no obvious functionality other than taking up space. In this article we will dive into the real meaning and function of the RMA test tile.
Longhorn build 3683 is the earliest of all Longhorn builds we have access to, dating back to September 2002. As such you might expect it to be very similar to XP and Server 2003 versions of Windows. When looking superficially at this build this may seem to be correct, but for those that care to take a closer look there are plenty of new features to be found throughout this build. Moreover, when…
In this third part of the Hacking Avalon series, we are taking a closer look at the process of making an Avalon application. To do this, we will be using a special tool only available in early Longhorn builds. This tool is called the Avalon Compiler or simply ac . This tool does what its name suggests; compile Avalon. What is that precisely?
Multiple patents were filed by Microsoft for this sensational effect. One of the patents shows some detailed screens of what Phodeo is supposed to look like. These images closely resemble some concepts shown by Hillel Cooperman at PDC ‘03, but are, in fact, not the same. Where the user in Hillel’s demo was Jim, the user in this concept is called Steven. Also note that in the image…
Often times people are confused to hear Longhorn was based off of Windows Server 2003. To the newcomer it seems more plausible that it was instead based off of Windows XP because early builds look so much like it. In this post we will have an in-depth look at the early beginning of the Longhorn project. Along the way we will discover how Longhorn emerged from the Server 2003 code base.
When using Longhorn, it’s a must to known how to manually install drivers in Windows. The process is basically the same in all versions of Windows, but I thought it couldn’t hurt if I would write up a short tutorial for those people new to installing drivers.
The original leak of Longhorn build 4093 from within Microsoft was broken and uninstallable. Prior to leaking the release to the public, the C0d3rz release group had attempted to repair the ISO and at least make it installable. While they loosely succeeded in this goal, the resulting product introduced a number of additional bugs and no effort had been expended to keep it as original as possible.
Always wanted to experiment with Avalon on Windows XP? In this second part of the “Hacking Avalon” series, we’re going to install not only Avalon but also some other Longhorn components. In this post, I will take Windows XP as example, but the installer is also compatible with Server 2003. Below is a description of the included components and their use.
This is the first post in a series that I’ll be doing. Hacking Avalon will be all about interesting stuff in Avalon. Furthermore, I hope to provide some background on how early variants of Avalon work together with the shell in Longhorn. Keep in mind, this series will mainly discuss the earliest revisions of Avalon found in Milestone 3 builds. The tricks may not always work on later builds.…
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. Originally this demo was cut from the footage from Bill Gates’ keynote that was published online at Channel9. I found bits and bops of the footage scattered over the web and decided to put them together in one large video. I…
Most of you will probably be aware of some hidden view options available throughout the Longhorn builds. These views are commonly known as “Carousel” and “Panorama”. The latter is often also called “Phodeo”. Enabling the 3D view-mode as well as one of these hidden views causes a DirectX rendered view to appear instead of the familiar plain 2D view. The DirectX…
At Microsoft, it is common practice to use products still under development to continue development of that very product. Once a stable version of a product is available, developers are encouraged to install it on their workstations and use it for everyday use. Developers using the product can directly provide feedback and report bugs to teams working on certain features. This process is…
This is the very first page in its kind; a tips ’n tricks page. More of these pages will follow for other interesting builds, showing you the ins and outs and providing easy tutorials to activate hidden features. Pages like this will be updated every so often to include the latest finds.
This quick introduction to hex was originally to be part of another article, but became quite long and therefore I decided to separate it. Even though it doesn’t have anything to do with Longhorn in particular, I believe it will be worth the read.
Ever looked at a Windows build list and wondered what all those different tags mean? Or did you ever wonder about the production process of Windows? If yes, you’ve just clicked the correct article. This article will elaborate on the Windows build process as used during the pre-reset Longhorn development. Please note that even though I’ve conducted rigorous research, not all information…
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. In this article I will elaborate on the exact purpose of the “onghornLay” branding.
Aurora is one of the eye-candy features which is best represented in Milestone 7 builds. Using the powerful Avalon presentation engine, Longhorn was able to draw fancy animations, like Aurora, without any significant performance hit on the processor. Aurora in the preview panel was first shown at the PDC 2003 conference when a private build was showcased. At first sight many people thought the…
A significant part of pre-reset Longhorn’s new UI sits on the .NET Framework. Sidebar, preview pane, Avalon shell views, tiles, a handful of control panels — managed code shows up all over the place. That said, it is easy to overstate the story. The whole shell was not rewritten in C#, and explorer.exe itself is still good old native Win32.
Run Microsoft’s Windows “Longhorn” today using these activation cracks for each build. Simply replace the “winlogon.exe” in your System32 folder with the copies contained in the ZIP below.
With the new image-based installation introduced in Milestone 4 it was also time for a revamped out-of-box experience (OOBE) wizard. The first build to feature the image-based install and new OOBE wizard is build 4001.
At WinHEC 2003 Microsoft revealed that Longhorn would be build from the ground up from a list of components. Already before this time various people at Microsoft had stated that Longhorn would be the first “modular” operating system. What does this all mean? I’ll try my best to get clear what componentising really is.
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. There’s a good reason why these compiles lack lots of features the x86 Longhorn compiles did have.
The “My TV and Movies” library becomes visible when using the Media Center Edition ( “Freestyle” ) variant of some Longhorn builds. The “My TV and Movies” library is a media application for recording and watching TV. The application is an Avalon container and is opened in Internet Explorer by the Avalon Shell Handler. The container itself includes a couple of…
There are two distinct “new” display control panels developed prior to the Longhorn reset. The first appeared in Milestone 3, and was removed in early Milestone 4. The second was present only in build 4093. Though both are created in the Avalon UI framework, it seems almost certain that the two efforts were not connected beyond their functionality and underlying technology.
In many Longhorn builds, there are issues with partitioning and formatting disks within the installer. Microsoft DiskPart is a utility included within the Windows Pre-installation Environment that allows you to partition disks from a command line interface.
The Longhorn Start page is a feature present in Milestone 3 and early Milestone 4 builds. The start page appears to be an early attempt at replacing the OOBE (Out-Of-Box Experience) that these builds carry over from Windows XP.
One common problem faced by people installing Longhorn on modern hardware is the apparent inability to boot from USB drives. As optical media grows rarer, and more and more form factors ship without optical media drives, booting from a disc is not always an option. Fortunately, booting Longhorn through USB can be a surprisingly easy affair once you know what you’re doing.