Before installing Windows code-named Longhorn on my new laptop, which is running Windows XP, my first thought were if my existing applications, drivers, and tools will work. After a few minutes of uncertainty, I decided to have both XP and Longhorn on the same machine. I got my PDC DVDs out from the case and started the installation. It took more than couple of hours to complete the installation.

After installing Longhorn, I was amazed and decide to share this experience with you guys.

Before I tell you that results, let me give you a little background about my laptop. I am running Windows XP Pro on Sony VAIO, Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz, 1GB RAM (See here ), and 80GB HDD. Other major software install on this machine are VS.NET 2003, Whidbey, Office 2003 SQL Server 2000, and SQL Server Yukon. Besides the software part, I have Verizon DSL line, HP printer, and Sony Cyber-shot® 2.0-Megapixel 1x Digital Zoom Digital Camera.

Now after installing Windows Longhorn my first action was to see if I can install printer, camera drivers and hookup my DSL. Just after finishing the installation, the setup asked me to check the updates on the Web. I was thinking, how can it check the software versions without connecting to the internet. But hey, guess. It found my existing settings for DSL from XP and automatically connected to the Internet without even manual dialing the modem. It was a pleasant experience. Now I could go online, download and install all software from MSDN site.

Next thing I tried was hooking up my Sony Cyber-shot camera. As soon as I hooked up the camera, it checked and installed the driver from my XP settings and next thing I was looking at the pictures from the camera.

First time it was something unexpected from Microsoft. After that I developed couple of XAML applications, ran and looked great. I also created couple of text and other documents. Now when you save these documents, you can add attributes (metadata) to these attributes besides what operating system stores itself. For example, now you can search a document based on the name of the author who has created them. So if I want to search for all the documents created between Dec 01 to Dec 12 by author Mahesh, I could do that using the operating system as well as using WinFS API from my applications.

Now I am running Whidbey, Yukon and other software and every thing is working just fine.

Even though Longhorn is in its pre-beta releases but it looks very promising. I sure can't wait to get my hands on beta and final versions