Microsoft is by no means all about the Windows operating system. In fact, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 3, as well as the next iteration of the Windows platform, Windows 7, are old news by now. There is a new star emerging from Redmond, and it is a non-Windows operating system: Singularity. At this point in time, Microsoft has made available the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) version 1.1for download via CodePlex. Still, the new operating system is not a Microsoft open source project, but one aimed at academic non-commercial use.

Singularity version 1.1 went live on CodePlex at the beginning of March 2008, and since then it has made its way to the top of the most popular projects on Microsoft's open source project hosting website. In fact, Singularity is featured in the number 1 spot under the CodePlex's Projects With Most Downloads section. "While looking around CodePlex for something else, I was interested to see that Singularity was the top downloaded project," said Lynn Langit, a Developer Evangelist for the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) team.

But make no mistake about it. Singularity does not offer a sneak peek into the future of Windows 7, Windows 8 or any future editions of the Windows platform. The Singularity project is an entirely new operating system built from scratch starting in 2003. The project comes with a new programming language and even new software verification tools. Singularity was authored almost entirely in the Sing# programming language, which is an extension of C#.

"We started the Singularity project over three years ago to explore how advances in languages, tools, and operating systems might produce more dependable software systems. Our goal remains to develop techniques and technologies that result in significant improvements in dependability. As a common laboratory for experimentation, we created the Singularity OS. Central to the OS are three fundamental architectural decisions that have significantly improved the ability to verify the expected behavior of software systems: software isolated processes (SIPs), contract-based channels, and manifest-based programs (MBPs)," revealed Singularity's creators Galen C. Hunt and James R. Larus from Microsoft Research.