Developers Will Get Windows 7 Alpha On Oct. 28

CWmike writes "Microsoft confirmed today that it will hand out 'pre-beta' release copies of Windows 7 on Oct. 28, at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist, has said attendees will receive a 160GB external USB hard drive that will presumably include the Windows 7 alpha. Mike Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, was cautiously optimistic that today's announcement meant Microsoft was on track with Windows 7. 'If they didn't do this, you would have to wonder if they could make the schedule,' Cherry said."

Comments

Vista/Mohave Remix

[clang_jangle]

No way it's anything else. MS couldn't code anything substantial that fast. Then again, I suppose they could have outsourced the whole thing...

Re:Vista/Mohave Remix

[reynaert]

I would be very surprised if Windows 7 is anything other than Vista SP2.

Re:Vista/Mohave Remix

[msclrhd]

The Vista codeline is what Windows 2008 is built on (it is Vista SP1 with additional server-orientated stuff). The Windows 7 codebase is built on top of this.

Also, from what I understand, MS aren't doing anything too drastic in the kernel.

With Vista as the foundation (which they rewrote a lot of, IIRC) they can make incremental, evolutionary improvements.

Take Firefox as an example: Mozilla didn't rewrite it when they were developing FF3; they cleaned up bits, for sure, and added new features, but it was a logical progression.

With the number of developers Microsoft has, they can do a lot of development work, so have the potential to add a lot to the Vista/2008 codebase.

Re:Vista/Mohave Remix

[drspliff]

Did you mean Vista RC1?

Re:Vista/Mohave Remix

[cbhacking]

It's a bit bigger than that. Multi-touch capabilities, vastly improved BitLocker, new networking capabilities that simplify sending/sharing files, a couple substantial changes to UAC (in some cases simply changing simple config options to make it less "annoying", in other cases adding new capabilities such as automatic elevation for MS-signed binaries). Bootup and hibernation are being parallelized and should run faster on multi-core machines now. Many apps, including the calculator, notepad, and Paint have undergone significant UI and/or feature upgrades. The general UI has been updated somewhat as well.

The kernel sounds remarkably similar, though. More like 6.1 or 6.2 than 7.0.

Re:Vista/Mohave Remix

[Taxman415a]

Emphasis on the bit. Of course they're just claiming that it's going to have multi-touch throughout anyway. Most likely it will be half assed and even if it isn't that would still make Windows 7 a far cry from the features that were promised to be in Vista/Longhorn years ago. So yes, basically it's Windows ME all over again.

Windows 7

[BigBlueOx]

AKA Windows DVIAMEWBSOSTLDF
(Damn! Vista Is A Major Embarrassment We'd Better Slam Out Something That Looks Different FAST!)

It's evangelism!

[Jabbrwokk]

Oh, vista's not dead...

Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist

Here's the text from his upcoming speech:

"And, beeHOLD, Ah say to YOO-uh, Windows 7 comes NOT to ABOLISH Vista but to FULFILL it! Ay-men!"

Don't stick around for the faith healings, you might get smacked upside the head with an external 160 Gig HDD.

Re:What happens to windows vista now ?

[blitzkrieg3]

they were still pushing and selling it to people ? ads and whatnot, with shaking butts etc ?

It looks like they're attacking this from two angles. There's the "Vista isn't as bad as you think it is" side, and the "Let's get something else out the door without a prejudiced bad reputation" side. Right now vista evokes the mental image of a steaming pile of bloat, so unless the marketing campaign can give the vista brand a positive image in the mind of consumers, there's no hurt in talking about the next big thing (that isn't vista). At the very worst, it will start out with 0 brand recognition, as opposed to negative, and reviews will probably be favorable considering that MS set the bar so low with vista.

Re:zomg! run!

[Dutch Gun]

Perhaps if you had spent some of those 20 seconds reading the article, you might have run across this sentence:

Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist working on the PDC, said earlier this week that attendees will receive a 160GB external USB hard drive that will contain all the developer bits from the conference. The USB drive will presumably include the pre-beta version of Windows 7.

So, this includes all the bits from the conference... this means a lot of video presentations, power-point presentations and images, along with (I'd presume) a number of SDKs, what have you...

The 160GB hard drive is in no way indicative of the final size of the Windows 7.

Oh, and my first harddrive was 20MB. :)

Re:External HD?

[Yvan256]

If they require an external HD to hand this thing out it better contain a boatload of documentation or developer tools. I've never seen one of these...

Here you go.

On the volume of the drive...

[Samantha Wright]

I imagine that this is akin to video game reviewers getting DSes and PSPs with the video game to review: it's just swag. And bribery. And you don't have to wipe a good machine to try it out.

I have trouble believing that Microsoft would deliberately submit themselves to a joke so transparent that half of the Slashdot comments are about it. They worry about that sort of thing. Why, I bet Ballmer is reading this thread and throwing chairs around right now!

October 8th is the private beta

[AmiMoJo]

October 9th is the public beta. I hear they will be using Bittorrent for distribution.