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Extended support for Windows Vista ends today

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Windows Vista is an operating system that has not gained much trust from end users. However, Windows Vista has started major changes for the better. The technologies that were part of the development of Windows Vista are the basic building blocks today, without which development for the Windows platform would not be what it is today.

During the development of Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn), its three building blocks were introduced – Windows Presentation Foundation (codename Avalon), Windows Communication Foundation (codename Indigo) and Windows Workflow Foundation (codename Workflow), all as part of the .NET Framework.

Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the successor to the GDI+ graphics library, which is in charge of rendering the user interface. Unlike it, it mainly uses the GPU for calculations, for which it uses DirectX. The graphical interface is described by the declarative XAML language, which brings the possibility to develop the graphical interface of the application independently of its functionality (if you use the MVVM design pattern). Unlike HTML, however, this language is not interpreted, but compiled. It also included Silverlight, formerly known as WPF/E, but later Microsoft preferred WebGL. XAML was used for development on Windows Phone and Windows Runtime, today it is used in the Universal Windows Platform and some parts of it can even be found in HTML5. The pattern for CSS Grid Layout is XAML Grid.

DirectX 10

DirectX 10 is a big update to the DirectX API. It includes the Model 4 shader, changes to sound processing, and is adapted to the new driver concept. The Xbox 360 included specific DirectX 9 extensions, which later became part of DirectX 10.

Lossy JPEG XR compressions

First Windows Media Photo, later HD Photo, and now JPEG XR (Joint Photographic Experts Group – Extended Range) is an image lossy compression format. It also supports lossless compression, transparency (α channel) and 48-bit color depth (in the case of RGB). It achieves noticeably better compression results than JPEG. Today, it is standardized as ISO/IEC 29199-2:2010 and is used in XPS (open eXtensible markup language Paper Spacification).

Visualization of directory contents, live previews of files

Until Windows XP , the icon for a file was always derived from its extension. Since Windows Vista, the icon is a preview of the file – for example, in the case of an image, you can see its thumbnail. This idea became the basis of the modern Windows Phone user interface, changing the concept of the Start menu from a drop-down menu hierarchy (Windows 95) to a group of Live Tiles (Windows 10).

Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a set of libraries that enable you to create applications such as server services and thin clients. By adding support for RSS and JSON, it was possible to create a simple endpoint for XmlHttpRequest in ASP.NET, thus expanding the capabilities of web services built on the .NET platform.

Windows Workflow Foundation

Windows Workflow Foundation is a description of the steps, described in XAML, that a process steps through. If you don't know what the XAML files in the BuildProcessTemplates folder are good for after creating a new team project, then know that this is the autobuild workflow in Team Foundation Services.

Other improvements in the system

Windows Preinstallation Environment

Windows Preinstallation Environment, or WinPE for short, is a version of Windows that you run from a DVD. True, nowadays more from flash memory. WinPE 2.0 is based on the same kernel as Windows Vista and contains many new features compared to its predecessors. These include support for a 64-bit system and Plug & Play technology.

Installing from a disc image

Faster installation of Windows Vista was ensured by moving the image of the pre-installed system to a specific machine. It was much faster than installing an operating system by copying individual files.

Windows Update is not dependent on ActiveX

The vast majority of Internet Explorer (IE) security threats were ActiveX exploits. However, Microsoft could not afford to remove it from the system quickly, because it had two major obstacles. On the one hand, Windows Update could not do without it, and on the other hand, it was widely used by banks in South Korea. Windows Update has been converted to a system service that is no longer dependent on IE. This allows, among other things, to download updates in the background.

Greater OS kernel resiliency to device driver errors

The vast majority of Windows XP crashes were caused by errors in drivers, especially graphics cards. Microsoft has therefore tightened the rules drastically. Only drivers that passed the quality test could be installed in the system. Windows Update has also started to offer new versions of drivers.

Background defragmentation

The hard drive, the biggest brake on the computer, requires proper care to slow down the computer as little as possible. Files are not stored in their entirety, but in parts to speed up their writing. However, if the file has many parts (fragments), it is slow to read. Therefore, from time to time, it was good to consolidate (defragment) all files. In Windows Vista, it was no longer necessary to think about it, defragmentation took place in the background.

Permissions in the system

Windows XP was designed so that all interventions in the system are done through the computer administrator account, while the current account is for daily use. Although it is relatively easy to switch between accounts (using the Win+L keyboard shortcut), it is still more convenient to use the administrator account normally. However, the system was not ready for this and such use carried a security risk. Windows Vista therefore brought User Account Control (UAC), where administrator rights are assigned to an application on demand.

BitLocker Drive Encryption

BitLocker is a tool that encrypts individual sectors of a disk using the AES algorithm in CBC mode with a 128-bit or 256-bit key. There are quite a lot of modes, the most interesting is probably the ability to store the key in the chip on the motherboard, which issues it to the bootloader only if there is no change in the boot settings.

Windows Defender and two-way firewall

Windows Vista, unlike Windows XP, included a two-way firewall from the beginning. At the time of Windows XP, it was not so much assumed that the user would install programs that he did not know what they were doing. One of the programs that was in charge of guarding the others was Giant AntiSpyware. Later, it became part of Microsoft and, called Windows Defender, was integrated into Windows Vista. Today, it is being developed at Microsoft’s Israel Research and Development Center, which has about 600 employees.

Windows PowerShell

At the end of 2002, Microsoft started working on PowerShell, then still under the code name Monad. Because it is built on the .NET platform, its pipeline is object-oriented. Unlike other shells, it is not necessary to process text into data, because the structure for the data is provided by its carrier – the object.

Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7 mainly contained a bug fix in the application of CSS to rank with IE6, which had the best CSS support among other browsers at the time. The seventh version did not receive the recognition it deserves. Some developers used CSS hacks instead of conditional comments, even though it was quite clear that no one was responsible for the permanence of the interpretation of undocumented and non-standardized parts of the code. It is surprising that even today some people blame IE7, even though the programmer used CSS hacks to consciously create pages in such a way that he could not guarantee their compatibility with newer versions of IE. At the same time, it is not generally known that the main problem can be easily solved by switching the browser to the box mode of the Internet Explorer model (box-sizing: border-box). Due to this misunderstanding caused by the W3 consortium, each new version of IE had to have a new rendering mode.

Public testing

Microsoft has taken a very open approach to the development of Windows Vista. The Beta 2 version has been downloaded by over five million people. A lot of journalists and bloggers wrote about their experiences. Of course, the system was not stable and could not be used for everyday work, which is completely normal for a system that is not in the final stage of development. However, this caused the system to have a bad reputation even before it hit the market.

This experience was reflected in the development of Windows 7 codenamed Blackbomb, later Vienna. New components were merged into the system only when they were debugged so as not to break the main development branch. The RC version was fine-tuned so much that it could be used for everyday work side by side with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.

An even more drastic change occurred with the advent of Windows 10. The new version of the operating system is installed for users gradually, depending on the circle they are in. The user chooses the radius in which he wants to be located, depending on how he wishes to balance the stability of the system, its support time and price. The individual areas are: