Bill Gates offered yesterday the first look at Longhorn, the next version of Windows. As pointed out by CNet, Longhorn is built around three major advances: a new graphics and presentation engine known as Avalon, a new communications architecture known as Indigo, and a new file system known as WinFS that borrows from Microsoft's relational database technology.

PC World has also a round-up of features shown and some others that are still in the works, the bottom line is however that Longhorn has still a long way off (2006?) and Microsoft is still looking for developer feedback to make sure they are headed in the right direction with the next generation OS.