3683's DCE

[jagotu]

You may be thinking, "What is this topic about? I thought 3706 was the first build to have DCE!" Well, what many pages documenting longhorn would like you to believe is not true. The team over at longhorn.ms (including me and Melcher) digged deep and find out that it's just the UI to enable it that's missing, and DCE itself is ready to be run!

We weren't able to find the proper drivers for VMs, so we ran to our real computers and after a while got it running:



To learn more about DCE, and see how you can get it running yourself, make sure to check Melcher's amazing article about Desktop composition at the new longhorn.ms.

So, what is your opinion about the earliest "DWM" we can get our eyes on? It isn't much, but it brought us all the aero and various later stuff

[cantasan99]

Microsoft must have hidden it. Or 3683 could be a early prototype for DWM/DCE.

[jagotu]

Microsoft must have hidden it. Or 3683 could be a early prototype for DWM/DCE.

Urm... what?

EDIT:
Well, I doubt they "hid" it, it was more probably just not ready for being shown (as you can see, the desktop background fails to render completely.
And as 3683 is the earliest build we have, it's the earliest version of DWM/DCE we have. We don't have any pre-reset longhorn build that doesn't have DCE, so we can't tell when they added it.

[cantasan99]

Microsoft must have hidden it. Or 3683 could be a early prototype for DWM/DCE.

Urm... what?

I read your article about DCE in Longhorn. In later builds DCE is much advanced than early ones. So, DCE in 3683 could be a skeleton for this feature. From simple to advanced, later builds contain much stable and complete DCE.

Micrsoft hid this feature, in my opinion, like new Start Menu in early Whistler builds.

[jagotu]

Yeah, I had trouble understanding what you were trying to say.

Who knows if they hid it on purpose or if they just didn't bother creating an UI for it back then. The fact that DCE in later builds is more advanced doesn't look too mysterious to me

[DragonExagon]

Well, for everything there's a start
That's the cool part of Longhorn, there's more stuff than you think.

[jagotu]

BONUS: As with every beta, not everything always works as it should

[youtube2]http://youtu.be/hnRxWjQGZVw[/youtube2]

[Winutiae]

This sounds familiar. Literally every site that covers Whistler says that 2250 is the first one with theming, except that in reality its 2223 with its' Business.thx theme. There's no UI for that either, but it can be applied by calling some functions in uxtheme.

[wasabilee]

lol this means you can port DCE to XP then
since 36xx uxtheme doesn't use dependency on it, yet it exists

[Lukas Marsik]

lol this means you can port DCE to XP then
since 36xx uxtheme doesn't use dependency on it, yet it exists

DCE relies on way more things than just uxtheme... for example user32

[jagotu]

That's not exactly true Lukas. All the user32 does is just syscall to win32k. win32k.sys is a kernel-mode module that is responsible for all drawing stuff - so it also contains all DCE code.

Good luck porting kernel modules to XP...

[WindowsLover]

Nice! I never attempted to activate any DCE before so i think I will have a go as well. Still don't know if it is possible to activate DCE on Parallel Desktop.

[wasabilee]

so to bump it a bit
when activated DCE

the desktop becomes black
there are no animations present (min/max/close)
true ?

and also, did anyone EVER tried to find a way how to make windows-es
non transparent in M3 builds while DCE is enabled ?