Windows Vista: Behind the scenes

The Wall Street Journal has a great article detailing the internal drama at Microsoft surrounding their move from a messy Windows Longhorn to their more modular
Windows Vista. Microsoft has historically allowed its many developers to each create their own pieces of Windows, which then get pieced together and painfully debugged to create a stable release. The new approach involved scrapping a large amount of legacy code in favor of a whole new code base, which isn't something they've really done since they built NT 4.0. The new platform for their code allows the introduction of Windows elements without throwing off the rest of the system; the modules are debugged automatically and the system even snitches on the engineers responsible for lame code. This system even eventually allowed for the reintroduction of WinFS, Gates's pet project which had been scrapped due to the mounting complexity of Longhorn. It didn't happen overnight, though. Hissy fits were thrown and feelings were hurt, but in the end a few code zealots managed to convince Gates & Co. of what needed to be done if they planned on ever actually releasing a new version of Windows. And the rest, as they say, is, well, you know.

[Via Slashdot]