Rebuilding a Legacy

Reddevnews publication Sept 2008, by Mary Jo Foley
How can developers prepare as Microsoft's "Midori" and other projects target a post-Windows future?
For a project that no one at Microsoft is talking about, there's a lot of noise circling around Redmond about "Midori." That's not too surprising given that Midori, if it ever makes it out of the incubator, could end up being the successor to the Windows operating system.
According to source tips and industry reports, Microsoft researchers are developing Midori as a microkernel-based OS that will work across distributed parallel and multi-core systems. And (in the words of Microsoft nemesis Steve Jobs) there's one more thing: Midori will likely be a managed-code OS from the ground up, meaning it won't necessarily be backward-compatible with Windows.
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Rockford Lhotka, Principal Technology Evangelist,Magenic Technologies Inc.:

"First we had DOS. Then we had Windows, which ran on DOS. Then we had Windows, with DOS emulated inside. Now we have .NET, which runs on Windows. It's only a matter of time before we have .NET, with Windows emulated inside," says Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist with Magenic Technologies Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that is focused on application development and consulting with headquarters in Minneapolis, Minn. "People look at me funny, like I'm crazy, when I say this, but I really think it's just a matter of time. Whether Midori is really a movement in this direction, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest."

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