[AccessD] Longhorn and the future of printing in Windows

Given the struggles with printers and deployment, I have seen here,
I thought I would pass this post on, there is relief in sight, but don't 
hold your breath.
It might be of interest to those doing long term development.
But I haven't seen Access running on Longhorn yet.

In addition to the post below this is also being added with Longhorn

Enterprise Printing With Web Services:
Problem: Never had the ability to know when job had actually completed
Cant trigger activities based on job completion
Dont know the status of job beyond being sent to the spooler
Solution: Rich eventing mechanism (WS-Eventing)
Benefits: True end of job
Richer error reporting with real time device status
Restarting unfinished jobs from PC in exactly the right place


This post is from a print spoooler software company. Merrion Computing.
A good site for VB Printer software code.

Date: Wed May 11, 2005 8:10 am
Subject: Longhorn and the future of printing in Windows

The next version of Windows (codenamed "Longhorn") features a very
radical overhaul of the printing subsystem which may well be of
interest to developers working with printer related applications.

[1] Metro Printing
"Metro" is a new standard for the document / spooler files that is
based on XML and is extensible. Using this format means that in the
future all printed documents will be stored in a format that is human
readable and not device dependent. This means that all the problems
with transfering documents from one print device to another will be a
thing of the past.

[2] Universal file display format
Since all applications that print on Longhorn will be spooled to this
new format and since this format is open it means that document
viewers (like the MS Word viewer or PDF) will no longer be needed.
Instead press print, print to a file and send the file to the
recipient (or publish it on the internet)...

Longhorn and Metro references:
There are a number of documents on
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/default.mspx that are
useful to developers wanting to get a head start on Longhorn
printing. I have downloaded them and will be writing up
articles/posts about specific parts...and the implication for printer
monitoring applications in the future.

I don't see a free print accounting module being added to the native OS
but mainly for legal reasons (MS are particularily anxious to avoid the
trouble that they had with the E.U. over bundling the free media player)

However the changes mean that it will be a lot easier to write more
sophisticated document handling and accounting applicatiosn and I would
see a number of third party providers (including ourselves) doing just
that. One of the greatest opportunities from my point of view is that
it will be possible to write components that plug in to the print path
in any CLR language (VB.Net, C# etc.)

I am angling to get a new development machine specifically for various
beta products (SQL Server 2005, Longhorn and Visual Studio 2005) and
will post up any code related to this that is of general use.


Hope this is helpful,
Duncan Jones
Merrion Computing Ltd
http://www.merrioncomputing.com
Post message: MerrionComputing at yahoogroups.com


-- 
Marty Connelly
Victoria, B.C.
Canada