Longhorn Developer Center...
... is up on MSDN.
The MSDN site on Longhorn now how some articles, along with an RSS feed. It also has some Longhorn SDK/documentation.
Update: A bunch of PDC slides are now available.
Although lots of stuff in Longhorn does seem exciting, I don't really like the PDC/Longhorn (over)hype, mostly because:
- 2006 is far away,
- it doesn't seem that ground-breaking compared to the competition,
- why do a bundled late release rather than upgrade various components separately (IE, .NET/winforms, NGSCB, ...)?
- I expected things like XAML in v1 winforms or at least in .NET 2.0 (release Whidbey), and similar solutions exist in other projects (XUL, thinlets, Glade),
- filesystem indexing and support for extensible and flexible metadata is already quite advanced on Linux,
- Apple already has a powerful rendering engine and some Linux project have extensive support for vector graphics.
This is a bit of a reduction of course, there is plenty of interesting things coming up in Longhorn. I am just not convinced they justify the hype, the bundled late release and MS re-inventing proprietary solutions instead of using more open and standard ones (msbuild, xaml, wvg, ...).
But having these technologies shipped in the dominant desktop OS definitely opens doors for interesting developments, especially in managed code.
Sometimes I just wonder what the situation would look like if Microsoft had be broken down into smaller companies by the monopoly trial. Instead of having tightly integrated products (without a clear benefit imho), we might have a great MS browser, more open protocols and a less centralized control.