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The next release of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system, code-named "Longhorn," is an essential milestone for many reasons. It is the first operating system built with managed code and the first to host a new storage subsystem (code-named "WinFS") that revolutionizes the concept of a file system. It is also the first operating system to support a natural search technology (Natural UI) that automatically resolves many of the ambiguities inherent in query text. In addition, Longhorn is the first operating system designed from the ground up with security and trustworthy computing at the core. These and other features suggest that Longhorn will change the way applications are built—not something that happens every day. Since the advent of Windows, I remember two similar milestones—the move to 32-bit Windows and the dawn of the managed environment of the Microsoft .NET Framework.
One of the most important changes in Longhorn is that this operating system makes it possible to write an application one time and use it in multiple deployment scenarios. To achieve this ambitious goal, Longhorn-based applications are completely object-oriented and based on a central Application object that provides all key services that are needed for running the application. In this article, I'll examine the Longhorn application model in some deapth and apply it to a few basic scenarios, including the classic Hello World application.

The Longhorn Application Model
The Application object is the heart of the Longhorn application model. Through its set of properties, methods, and events, the object enables you to arrange a collection of markup pages—a sort of enhanced version of HTML—into a coherent and classic Windows-based application. The Application object is the root application object available in Longhorn. It provides basic application support and will typically be used by those applications that need low overhead and don't use page navigation and state management. More complex Longhorn applications will use the closely related NavigationApplication object, which inherits from Application but adds support for navigation.
A typical Longhorn application can be thought of as a set of pages scripted with some procedural code. The Application object controls the execution of the program and raises events to the user code. Pages are written in a new declarative markup language, code-named "XAML" (Extensible Application Markup Language). With XAML elements you control the layout of each page, including the display of text and images and the insertion of interactive components such as buttons and textboxes. In summary, XAML is the language used to declaratively render the user interface of the pages that make up the application. In addition to using XAML, you can also write applications for Longhorn entirely with procedural code. In general, successful Longhorn-based applications have two ingredients—XAML pages and managed procedural code. How you combine them is up to you, but any combination of the two is acceptable.
By using a combination of XAML and C# (or Visual Basic® .NET) code, you can build various types of output files including traditional Windows desktop executables, DLL libraries, and console applications. In addition, if your application is simple enough, it can be rendered using freestanding XAML markup, thus producing another type of application to add to the list. Standalone XAML files are runnable within the Longhorn shell and the browser as long as they don't reference some codebehind class. Finally, it is worth noting that Windows executables can be hosted in a window (by default) as well as in the browser. In both cases, the code remains the same and only needs to be compiled again with a different project property.
For Longhorn, desktop executables are the next version of today's Windows Forms client-side apps. On the other hand, XAML and browser-hosted applications represent an evolution of today's client-side programming model to work over the Web. Right now, existing client-side applications can rarely be deployed over the Web. If you want to embed a Windows Forms form into a browser page, you'll get a reduced feature set and have to tweak bits and pieces of your code. With Longhorn, the common application model will let you write one application and deploy it over the Web. However, the final application is Longhorn-specific—very different from a traditional Web application like ASP.NET.
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