Technical features new to Windows Vista

In addition to the new user interface, security capabilities, and developer technologies, several major components of the core operating system were redesigned, most notably the audio, print, display, and networking subsystems; while the results of this work will be visible to software developers, end-users will only see what appear to be evolutionary changes in the user interface.

As part of the redesign of the networking architecture, IPv6 has been incorporated into the operating system, and a number of performance improvements have been introduced, such as TCP window scaling.

The service is being used to give applications the ability to work with the file system and registry using atomic transaction operations.

This does have the effect of preventing DirectSound from being hardware-accelerated, and completely removes support for DirectSound3D and EAX extensions,[4] however APIs such as ASIO and OpenAL are not affected.

Windows Vista also includes a new Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS) that allows multimedia applications to register their time-critical processing to run at an elevated thread priority, thus ensuring prioritized access to CPU resources for time-sensitive DSP processing and mixing tasks.

This is because the internal resampler, which is no longer configurable, defaults to linear interpolation, which was the lowest-quality conversion mode that could be set in previous versions of Windows.

[5][6] New digital signal processing functionalities such as Room Correction, Bass Management, Loudness Equalization and Speaker Fill have been introduced.

Windows Vista also includes the ability to calibrate speakers to a given room's acoustics automatically using a software wizard.

Microsoft has also included a new high quality voice capture DirectX Media Object (DMO) as part of DirectShow that allows voice capture applications such as instant messengers and speech recognition applications to apply Acoustic Echo Cancellation and microphone array processing to speech signals.

Windows Vista includes speech recognition for 8 languages at release time: English (U.S. and British), Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Chinese (traditional and simplified).

[22] XPS is an XML-based (more specifically XAML-based) color-managed device and resolution independent vector-based paged document format which encapsulates an exact representation of the actual printed output.

XPS documents are packed in a ZIP container along with text, fonts, raster images, 2D vector graphics and DRM information.

For printers supporting XPS, this eliminates an intermediate conversion to a printer-specific language, increasing the reliability and fidelity of the printed output.

[23] At the core of the XPS print path is XPSDrv, the XPS-based printer driver which includes the filter pipeline.

Filters can perform a single function such as watermarking a page or doing color transformations or they can perform several print processing functions on specific document parts individually or collectively and then convert the spool file to the page description language supported by the printer.

The XPS format used in the spool file, represents advanced graphics effects such as 3D images, glow effects, and gradients as Windows Presentation Foundation primitives, which are processed by the printer drivers without rasterization, preventing rendering artifacts and reducing computational load.

Windows Vista contains a new networking stack, which brings large improvements in all areas of network-related functionality.

The new stack is also based on a strong host model and features an infrastructure to enable more modular components that can be dynamically inserted and removed.

The user interface for configuring, troubleshooting and working with network connections has changed significantly from prior versions of Windows as well.

In addition, the Network Map uses LLTD to determine connectivity information and media type (wired or wireless).

This allows implementation of wireless-specific features such as larger frame sizes and optimized error recovery procedures.

[36][37] The new architecture introduces a firmware-independent data store and is backward compatible with previous versions of the Windows operating system.

The Win32 API is also present in Windows Vista, but does not give direct access to all the new functionality introduced with the .NET Framework.

WPF uses Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which is a variant of XML, intended for use in developing user interfaces.

WCF programming model unifies Web Services, .NET Remoting, Distributed Transactions, and Message Queues into a single Service-oriented architecture model for distributed computing, where a server exposes a service via an interface, defined using XML, to which clients connect.

A Relying Party issues a request to an application for an identity, by means of a Policy that states what Claims it needs and what will be the physical representation of the security token.

Windows CardSpace also keeps a track of all Identities used, and represents them as visually identifiable virtual cards, accessible to the user from a centralized location.

The default catalog is called SystemIndex and it stores all the properties of indexed items with a predefined naming pattern.

While most of the same sockets programming concepts exist as in user-mode Winsock such as socket, creation, bind, connect, accept, send and receive, Winsock Kernel is a completely new programming interface with unique characteristics such as asynchronous I/O that uses IRPs and event callbacks to enhance performance.

Windows Filtering Platform allows external applications to access and hook into the packet processing pipeline of the networking subsystem.