Some interesting stuff about the longhorn APIs, will the wine GDI be complete they are also obsolete? The good news is that if the windows APIs go from 76.000 to 8-10.000 then the longhorn APIs should be implemented in wine much faster.
A: In the technology generations leading up to Longhorn, Microsoft has been moving to a .NET-based managed code environment, and the Longhorn generation will finally mark a clean split with the Win32 APIs of the past. That is, Win32 will be in maintenance mode, and all new development will occur with managed .NET APIs. One such API, Avalon, forms the basis for the new Desktop Compositing Engine (DCE) in Longhorn that replaces GDI and GDI+. Another, called Aero, provides APIs for the new user interface. All of the new Longhorn APIs will utilize the XML Application markup language (XAML) to make Longhorn more accessible to developers than ever before. The idea is to significantly reduce the number of APIs and make the APIs more standardized. Today, there are over 76,000 Win32 APIs, and countless wrappers. With Longhorn, Microsoft hopes to reduce the API set to 8,000 to 10,000. Complete text http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/longhorn.asp
