A sketchy Channel 9 post about Vista's new Restart Manager
The exciting bit for me isn't that Vista might need to be rebooted less often. Rebooting is part of Life, especially when that Life involves Windows. It's been getting slowly better for years, but i don't expect this to eliminate it or even make it dramatically easier.
The exciting bit is the standardized API for notifying programs that they are being restarted, and should save and restore their state. Not bug the user about saving stuff, or throw changes away, or start uploading massive amounts of data to a slow network drive... just quickly save the current state of things so that it can be restored later.
Why is this exciting? It may not be for you, if you're one of those careful, organized people who don't tend to keep 30 files open in seven different text editors along with a dozen or so emails and ten or so websites... But i'm not one of those people, and it really bugs me when my machine locks up or i have to reboot to install patches, and it takes me the rest of the day to get comfortable with my work environment again. If i could add a little script that allowed me to reboot while first saving the state of all those various apps, i could then go get a soda, knowing that i could go right back to work when i got back.
Nice, eh? Eh? Eh!
Not exciting enough? Then how 'bout this: remember OS/2? The Workplace Shell? I loved writing code in OS/2... even when i was writing for DOS (most of the time), i loved the environment. Why? I didn't need an IDE! My work environment in OS/2 consisted of a folder for each project, containing one or two command prompts and the source files that made up the project (.cpp, .h, Makefile, etc...). Larger projects might contain sub-folders for libraries, etc.
Doesn't sound too unusual, right? Why would i prefer such a classic, pedestrian means of managing projects over a nice shiny IDE-based project manager?
Because when you closed a WPS folder, documents opened from it closed with it... And when you re-opened the folder, the previously opened documents re-opened!
This was brilliant - i could open and close source files, change the arrangement of windows, setup command prompts with specialized paths, scripts, etc. and rest assured that i could close the whole mess whenever i needed to, and when i re-opened it it would be restored just as i left it.
For ten years, i've been waiting for Windows to come up with something as conceptually simple and yet functionally powerful as this nearly-forgotten interface from the early '90s. Finally, [in another three or five years when Vista has become common enough for developers to actually care about writing for it] i can have it.
