Microsoft codenames are the codenames given by Microsoft to products it has in development, before these products are given the names by which they appear on store shelves. Many of these products (new versions of Windows in particular) are of major significance to the IT community, and so the terms are often widely used in discussions prior to the official release. Microsoft usually does not announce a final name until shortly before the product is publicly available.
There has been some suggestion that Microsoft may move towards defining the real name of their upcoming products earlier in the product development lifecycle so as to avoid needing product codenames.[1]
Cancelled upgrade for Windows 95; sometimes referred to in the press as Windows 96. Codename was reused for Internet Explorer 4.0 which incorporated many of the technologies planned for Nashville.
The codename was the key to activating an easter egg in Windows 98:
open the "Date and Time" control panel;
go to the "Timezone" page;
hold the Control key and drag a line with the mouse cursor from Memphis, Egypt (or maybe Cairo, codename of Windows NT 4 - the map is too small to tell) to Memphis, Tennessee. Still holding the Control key, drag another line from Memphis to Redmond, Washington;
Terminal Server adds "multiheading" support to Windows (the ability to run multiple instances of the graphics subsystem), and the hydra is a mythologicalmonster with multiple heads.
first major Windows release since Windows 3.0 without a codename;
first major Windows NT release whose client variant was named "Professional" instead of "Workstation";
first major Windows NT release without the "NT" designation in the trade name, which caused confusion when Windows Me was released. The original Windows line (Windows 9x) has since been dropped altogether, and Windows NT operating systems since then are simply referred to as "Windows".
Trainyard was an engineering package of driver updates to ship simultaneously with Windows XP Service Pack 1, the most major of which was support for USB 2.0 which was also ported backwards to Windows 2000.
A low-end version of Windows XP that is intended to be a thin-client that works with older hardware. Available through Software Assurance program. The Eiger is a mountain in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. The Eiger is part of a trio of mountains, The Eiger, The Mönch and The Jungfrau.
Similar to Eiger, but supports Windows Mobile devices, Windows Image Acquisition, wireless networking, VPN-s and advanced IP (Internet Protocol) security. The Mönch is a mountain in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. The Mönch is part of a trio of mountains, The Eiger, The Mönch and The Jungfrau.
Went gold (RTM) on 8 of November 2006. Named after the Longhorn Bar in the Whistler-Blackcomb resort; initially planned as an "interim release" between "Whistler" and "Blackcomb" (which was "Vienna" and is now Windows 7).
Announced at CES 2007. Original project codename was "Quattro" because it was the leader of the project's 4th attempt at building a home server at Microsoft. Renamed to Q once the project moved out of incubation stage.
Windows Mobile 5.0 was officially announced at Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference 2005 in Las Vegas, May 9-12 2005. (based on Windows CE 5.0)
The implementation is still contained in a DLL called quartz.dll. DirectShow and Windows Media Player first appeared as ActiveMovie and ActiveMovie Player as optional components in Windows 98.
The first version of Visual Basic.[9] The standard dialogs and controls created by the Visual Basic runtime library all have "Thunder" as a prefix of their internal type names (for example, buttons are internally known as ThunderCommandButton).
Team System-only release after Visual Studio 2008. Named after a resort located on Orcas Island. It's also the second most important city in Argentina.
Originally called Iridium, but Microsoft received a cease and desist order from Motorola which already had a project with that code name, so Microsoft chose the previous element in the periodic table.
Platinum
Exchange Server 2000
Titanium
Exchange Server 2003
Exchange 12
Exchange Server 2007
So named so as to fit along with Office 2007's working name, Office 12.
"‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form."[15] Midori is closely related to Singularity in that it is written entirely in managed code. [16]
Project Lightning was the original codename for the Common Language Runtime in 1997.[17] The team was based in building 42, hence Project 42.[18] "Next Generation Windows Services" appeared in the earliest press releases about the upcoming platform.[19]
COM+ 2.0, COM Object Runtime (COR), Universal Runtime (URT)
Microsoft .NET Framework v1.0
The name COM+ is still in use to designate extensions to COM (currently at version 1.5) for resource management, integrated security and transactionality. .NET itself has little in common with COM and COM+.
Allows developers to use managed code to program GPU's to create highly parallel programmes.
Astoria
ADO.NET Data Services
A framework that takes advantage of Windows Communication Foundation and the Entity Data Model (EDM) to allow developers to expose data in the cloud.
Rotor
Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI)
ParallelFX
Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework
An extension of the .NET Framework which allows developers to make better use of multi-core and multi-CPU operating environments without much effort. Applications written using ParallelFX will automatically scale to make use of the hardware they are running on.
Zermatt
Microsoft Identity Framework
An framework which allows developers to develop claims aware applications and systems.
Microsoft's first LAN-based email product written in-house. (Microsoft had earlier purchased Intermail for AppleTalk networks and Network Courier for PC networks.)
Budapest
Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access 2005
Catapult
Microsoft Proxy Server 1.0
Cider
Visual Studio designer for building Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Meant to be used by application developers.
Cirrus
Access 1.0
Concur
Aims to: define higher-level abstractions (above "threads and locks"); for today’s imperative languages; that evenly support the range of concurrency granularities; to let developers write correct and efficient concurrent applications; with lots of latent parallelism; that can be efficiently mapped to the user’s.
The platform was initially code named Tsunami,[22] but once the decision was made to make it an actual product it was just changed to the initials as the initials were enough of a code name.[22]
Named after the play Waiting for Godot (centered around the failure of a man named "Godot" to appear and the endless wait for him), because it was felt to be long overdue.[24]
Monads, according to philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's monadology, are the ultimate elements of the universe, individual percipient beings, and MSH is similarly composed of small, individual modules the user puts in interrelation.
Word for Windows 1.0 for Windows 2.x, named after the penguin in the comic strip Opus.
Palladium
Trusted Windows
Effort to develop a small, very secure operating environment within Windows, including curtained memory, trusted input, and graphics. Project renamed to Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, and was never fully implemented.
Website in Alpha testing stage providing mashup and webpages creation tools, with publishing as Rich Internet Application option.
Tahiti
Supposedly a family of multi-core technologies including an operating system, applications and development tools designed to make better use of today's multi-core CPUs. It is believed that Midori may be a part of this suite of new Microsoft technologies.[29]
Was originally Kilimanjaro but changed to Titan as Kilimanjaro was too difficult to spell.[22]
Jasper
“Jasper” provides a programming interface to your data that is well-suited to rapid development. When a Jasper program runs, Jasper connects to the database, determines the database schema, and generates corresponding data classes. This generation step does not result in source files; the data classes are compiled in-memory and available for use within the running program.
In Microsoft jargon, the "toaster" is the hardware equivalent of fictional entities, such as the Contoso company or the TempuriURI (http://tempuri.org/), used in documentation and sample code as placeholders to be redefined by third-party developers.
The convention of calling a fictional hardware device "toaster" is by no means exclusive to Microsoft, but Microsoft formalizes the concept to an unprecedented level: the "toaster" is prominently featured in the Driver Development Kit (DDK), as a fictional hardware device that performs no function but is extremely complex. The "toaster" is removable, plugged in a dedicated bus, it has hotplug support, power management, a customized driver installation procedure, and even UPS functionality. Its device driver implements all the required APIs but no other function, and it's released as a sample "skeleton" driver for developers of actual hardware devices.
