﻿ Spreading the .NET surface area | ZDNet  Spreading the .NET
surface area  Summary: Mary Jo Foley recently blew the lid off
Longhorn's "Dirty Little Secret." Longhorn isn't going to be
based on the .  Mary Jo Foley recently blew the lid off
Longhorn's "Dirty Little Secret." Longhorn isn't going to be
based on the .NET Framework, as we all thought. Only a fraction
of the total would be written for .NET (Avalon and Indigo),
leaving the majority of the operating system as native code.
Unfortunately, I don't think there was any "lid" on this. When I
went to the Professional Developers Conference in October 2003,
I didn't come away thinking that Microsoft was going to rewrite
the entire Windows OS in .NET. That would be nuts. .NET, or
managed runtime environments in general (including Java), by its
very nature demands that something be written in native code.
Processors don't understand .NET IL or Java bytecodes. That
means everything, at some point, must be in the language of the
processors, which means that mo