er. sure....
Yes WinFS has been delayed, although you can already get betas of it if you are feeling very brave. It's not exactly unexpected, an object file system isn't something you can pull out from under a rug and go 'tada!'. It takes time. In perticular the ability to store .net objects withouth serialization sounds really quite interesting to me.
The actual 'new feature list' of vista, if from memory, is around 3,000 long. So while two of the major bullet points have been delayed, it doesn't exactly mean the OS is dead.
And don't forget it's not just one OS. it's also Vista servers, Vista media centre, Vista tablet edition, etc. This is the first time MS has released all major versions of the OS at the same time.
From what I've read about the new audio stack, the reimplemented stuff is actually both better quality and better performance. I forget the details, but the 32bit-throughout gives you much much better sound quality and moving it into user-mode (out of kernel-mode) removes context switching and thus improves performance. Probably also increases stability in the case of crappy drivers. Similar sort of logic to WDDM/D3D10.
Yeah. There is a very good interview on channel9 about this, I can't remember exactly, but I think the lowest level Api guarenteed less than ~5ms audio responce time (or something like that). Basically it put it into professional audio equipment territory.
Other things like the completly rebuilt tcp/ip stack would be a similar example. Again there is an impressive interview on channel9, in one stress test, high-ping high packet loss situation I think they boosted their download speed by over 5x. Lots of things under the surface that can't be noticed all that easily.
Saying lets not worry about it because in a year or two the problem might go away isn't right in my view because we forget that customers may need to buy upgrades of their software to get back to the performance they used to have.
Sigh. First it effects legacy applications, and does not effect them any where near as badly as you might exect. This is what I said. Only certain parts of GDI are currently accelerated anyway.
A clear example of the poor performance is to open an explorer window in Vista and XP and click and drag a selection rectangle. On XP it should be quick and smooth, on Vista it has a noticable lag. Or in classic mode try dragging a window and watch the cpu usage.
I find dragging a selection box to be perfectly responsive on both XP and vista.
In classic mode, afaik, you can use XP drivers, with gdi hardware acceleration, so if you are getting high cpu usage from dragging a window then I guess you do not have drivers that support this. Which isn't exactly unexpected as it's a beta.
What I'd really like to know is why MS made GDI+ to not be hardware accelerated anymore, considering pretty much all apps use it... Same thing with directsound too by the way. Why the fuck remove features already implemented? *boggles*
It's a design issue. GDI's design is such that you are drawing to a single buffer. You have a device context for that device, which basically means you lock that surface and can both draw to it, and read from it. For a hardware accelerated UI, both these issues pretty much make things impossible (perforance wise). You don't want to lock anything, and you really really don't want to read back data.
As I say, 'GDI' in .net does get full vista acceleration, because it was designed such that you can detect when either of these cases is required, and in the vast, vast majority of cases, they are not.
In XP, you can call GetDC(0) to get the device context of the desktop. This is the surface all windows are rendered to in XP. Programs that take screenshots of the desktop use this. However, do this in vista and you will instantly disable the compositing engine, as you can imagine, it would be pretty much impossible to lock this surface with acceptable performance at both the app end, and for the entire OS.
As for DirectSound, are you thinking of the XNA framework? this does remove direct sound, but instead replaces it with XAct, which is a much better API, and is cross platform (with xbox 360, like the rest of xna). However MDX 1.1 will still stick around...
Once I get the next vista beta and office 2007 beta then I'll probably end up moving off xp as my primary os.
