Ah, it's spring in Seattle, and our hearts turn to WinHEC. Seriously now, this is the time of year when I most like my job. To produce WinHEC, we get to work closely with the Windows Base team, the Windows Device Experience Group, and others who are involved in building core features in Windows Vista and Windows Server Longhorn for systems and devices. It's my job to help teams explain what's new in Windows and how hardware engineers and driver developers can take advantage of these new features.

With this inside view, I also learn about the hard choices that Windows teams have to make. For example, one controversy I've been watching is the decision about when Microsoft will support EFI--Extended Firmware Interface--in Windows. EFI is the next-generation firmware model, set to replace the legacy BIOS in the coming decade. EFI serves as the interface between hardware and the operating system.

Windows Vista and Windows 2003 Server already support EFI 1.10 on Intel Itanium platforms. In the future, Windows Vista will also support native UEFI boot on x64 64-bit platforms. EFI support for x64 systems, however, will first be delivered with the release of Windows Server Longhorn.

Why wait? For Microsoft, support for UEFI means rigorous testing on a wide-ranging mix of UEFI implementations and hardware platforms. As we learned when the industry shifted to ACPI with Windows 2000, every major PC or server manufacturer has its own firmware implementation for its own unique hardware. Therefore, we can't test just one implementation on one type of hardware. But to date, no production-ready UEFI implementations are available. So Windows teams cannot complete the appropriate testing before Windows Vista is released. By the time Windows Server Longhorn is released, we expect sufficient UEFI implementations to be available for testing with a solid set of manufacturers' hardware platforms.

Microsoft is working closely with the Unified EFI Forum and industry partners to ensure that we can provide a high-quality, standards-based EFI solution that works across x86 and x64 hardware. As part of this effort, Microsoft is providing a "technology preview" of EFI in the Windows Vista Beta 2 release. This preview will allow our partners to begin testing their UEFI implementations.

Want to know more? A new white paper--EFI and Windows--on the WHDC Web site provides technical background and information about Microsoft plans.

Want even more? At WinHEC in Seattle, we'll be discussing the nitty-gritty details at sessions like "Inside the Windows Pre-Boot and Boot Environment" in the System Fundamentals track. I hope to see you there. Pre-registration for WinHEC in Seattle ends May 16.

And we are carrying this great information about advances in Windows Vista and Windows Server Longhorn to WinHEC Taipei, June 12-13.

- Annie Pearson
for the WHDC Web team

WHDC After Dark: While we're preparing for WinHEC, it's late at night when some of the best links are traded.