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Microsoft proud to hand over Vista 'features' early

by Steve Kerrison on 30 November 2005, 21:01

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The Register

Microsoft will include most of the "final" features in pre-release editions of its next Windows client for early evaluation to help produce a more stable product.

The company claimed Tuesday it has accelerated development of Windows Vista to get most features code complete by the end of December, and that all features would be integrated into the already delayed operating system by "early" next year.

Amitabh Srivastav, corporate vice president for Windows core operating system development, said the move meant pre-release versions of Windows Vista could now reflect the final product with beta testers able to properly evaluate code.

"Customers will have Windows Vista sooner in their hands than any previous Windows release, to enable us to receive meaningful Windows feedback much earlier and test with code that will more accurately reflect the product we ship," he said.

Srivastav declined to say how much Microsoft has accelerated development. He also declined to say when the second Windows Vista beta would ship, although expectations are for very early in 2006. With a Windows Vista Community Technology Preview (CTP) due "before the Christmas holidays" that means beta 2 is likely to preview most of the final product's features.

Srivastav, meanwhile, committed Microsoft to delivering CTPs - pre-release builds of products that are delivered between the main betas - of Windows Vista using a timetable that is driven by "quality" not "calendar dates." He also re-committed to delivery of Windows Vista in the second half of 2006 with the companion Longhorn server due in calendar year 2007.®

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Posted by TheAnimus - Wed 30 Nov 2005 21:29
Vista I really don't know wether to be excited about, when i first got my hands on NT4 i fell in love. It was years ahead of the other OS's (to be fair my favourate at the time was RISC OS, because it was so damn snappy, having most of it in ROM).

When linux came out, it always made me shudder, as you get silly sugestions like “if we had decent HAL then device driver writing would be easy, so quality would fall” and a massive loss of product. It feals like your walking on a million different monkies, most of which have eaten baked beens for supper. XP didn't excite me at all. Instead it left me fealing empty.

What i mean is, when XP came out people are like “oooooh themes”.

I played with litestep in the windows 98 days on my games partition. Themeing was nothing new, and like I'd got bored of litestep after a month, i knew it wasn't really going to mean anything to me.

What i failed to take into account as the arogant 16 year old who was getting his grubby mits on beta's of XP was how much easyer my mother would find it. Heck this box i'm on runs 2k3, i turned themes on! Fancy new start menu. All there.

Vista has some very intresting APIs. Now i know that dosen't excite non-programmers, but for us, its like been handed a bigger canvas, with more colours, and told we can use our penis as brush or any of the other things Tate Modern has taught me. We've been given more tools to let us do more stuff quicker.

I won't bore people with that any more, lets talk buisness, your staff will eventually prefer this. Its also got some really clever patching. You can patch a driver without rebooting. If its as good as the plays on the beta I've had the number of re-starts once people get used to writing for it, should be none. Thats good for uptime.

However it has a lot of disapointments, not as much is managed as had once hoped (managed code is better, its just often impractical, but .net has proved that not to be true (sorry java fan boys!)). WinFS turns out to be a pile of poo. And its going to be sold in the most confusing manner known to man. Granted they've “pulled an apple” in how to get people to pay for the OS (little & often) but its bad enough with home and pro of XP having to say, no, you can't use your home laptop at work because you need Pro. Idoits just don't understand the differnce, they think that its just a con by the IT department to get more overtime.

rant over.