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Chicago (IL) - Several industry sources have confirmed to TG Daily that a very early version of Windows 7, previously code-named Blackcomb Vienna, already has been shipped to “key partners” as a “Milestone 1” (M1) code drop for validation purposes. A roadmap received by TG Daily indicates that the new operating system will be introduced in the second half of 2009.

While it has generally been believed that Windows 7 was scheduled for a 2010 debut, Microsoft has revised the roadmap and apparently moved up the release date by a few months: A recently distributed roadmap of the OS lists a release to manufacturing in H2 2009. Microsoft declined to comment on this date.

The current M1 drop is available to Microsoft partners in English only and has shipped in x86 and x64 versions. An interesting feature that has been highlighted by Microsoft is the ability of the M1 software to handle a heterogeneous graphics system consisting of multiple graphics cards from different vendors. A new version of the Media center is already integrated in this software, but supports PC speakers only at this time.

If Microsoft will be able to keep the H2 2009 RTM (and most likely) release date in place, the company will have two busy. The M2 code drop is currently scheduled for April/May 2008, M3 will follow in the third quarter. The dates for the first Beta and the release candidate are still listed as “To be determined” but it doesn’t take much to see that the first beta versions could become available a year from now.

We will have more clarity on when we could see Windows 7 going into production will when Microsoft announces Windows Logo Program Changes for Windows 7. According to the policy of the firm, these changes will be announced 18 months prior to the scheduled RTM.

There are very few pieces of information about Windows 7 and the features it will bring available at this time. So far, we have heard only about new touchscreen features as well as – and probably most interesting – MinWin, a much smaller kernel of the operating system that takes up only 40 MB of memory.

Source : TG Daily

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Julie Larson-Green, responsible for the user interface of Office 2007, and also the person behind the ribbon-like interface has been transferred to the Windows 7 team.

The current release date of the Windows 7 operating system is expected to be in late 2009, early 2010, returning to the 3-year pause between desktop operating system versions that was common at Microsoft for all Windows versions prior to Windows Vista.

The most common dilema about Windows 7 right now is whether or not to use backward compatibility. Strong rumours have suggested that the OS will be developed from scratch on top of the Windows NT kernel, given its maturity in both security and stability terms. The backward compatibility, however, is something that Microsoft developers would frown upon, since it prevents truly revolutional ideas to be implemented. Windows Vista, because of its backward compatibile, carries a large amount of code libraries with it, thus the large size of the operating system. However, many businesses that haven't upgraded their software in a decade or more would not purchase Windows 7 if it was not compatible with their applications. As a result, the current options that Microsoft has are to either make Windows 7 backward compatible, or to maintain a legacy version of Windows in parallel, for the business customers, one which will be kept alive by Microsoft though patches and updates.

Almost two months ago Eric Traut gave a presentation on operating systems in which MinWin was brought to light for the first time. Although used for running a basic HTTP server, MinWin is a stripped down version of the Windows kernel that will be used as the foundation for Windows Vienna. MinWin is composed of approximately 100 files totalizing 25MB on disk and 40MB set up, in comparison with Vista which is made up of over 5000 files and approximatley 2500MB on disk.

Since MinWin is simply an effort from Microsoft to bring the kernel down to the smallest possible size in order to achieve the best efficiency for the upcoming versions of Windows, it will not be a kernel that is going to be distributed all by itself but merely a starting point for the next generation of operating systems built by Microsoft that break the legacy with the Vista operating system and its ancestors.

The post-Vista edition of Windows doesn't yet have a name, but it's got a date - 2010 - and it's getting a fresh look.

The former was revealed at Microsoft's Global Exchange sales conference in Orlando last week, according to Windows watcher Mary Jo Foley. Foley cites a PowerPoint presentation indicating that "Microsoft is anticipating it will take at least three years from now to get the next version of Windows client out the door." A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Foley that " Microsoft is scoping Windows ‘7' development to a three-year timeframe, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar."

If you're wondering what happened to the codenames of Vienna, and before that Blackcomb, which were originally attached to the OS, Windows senior VP Steven Sinofsky has banished those ciphers name as a sign of his desire to refocus the team on the steak rather than the sizzle. It's in keeping with Sinofsky's previous reign over Office 2000, XP/2002, 2003 and 2007 - all of which were known only by their internal version numbers (such as Office 2007 being ‘Office 12') before being christened with a marketing label.

"No fancy codenames for you!": Windows veep Steven Sinofsky goes back to basics with 'Windows 7'The next edition of Windows will technically be the seventh generation of the Windows NT codebase which is now the foundation for the client OS (the clock starts at Windows NT 3.1; this was followed by NT 4, while Windows 2000 was also ‘Windows NT 5' and XP a mere 5.1, until Vista clicked the meter over to Windows version 6).

And as he did with Office 2007, Sinofsky has declared that all bets are off when it comes to the UI of Windows 7. He's hired Julie Larson-Green, who lead the Office 2007 user interface team under Sinofsky's watch, as VP in charge of the "the Windows User Experience" or UX program.

Larson-Green was pivotal in the dramatic redesign of Office 2007, which ditched the long-established model of menus and toolbars - which had grown cluttered and out of control over two decades of development - for that single integrated and context-morphing ‘ribbon'. Few could argue that Windows isn't in need of a similar cleanup job - the iconic overload of Vista's Control Panel is a prime example of a once-friendly UI turned ferral.

Jensen Harris, who was program manager for the Office 2007 UX team and now fills Larsen-Green's role in fine-tuning the face of Office 14 (not wishing to tempt fate, they're skipping 13!) recalls that it was Sinofsky who drove the suite's radical interfacelift.

"It originated with Steven Sinofsky" Harris told APC in a recent interview. "Steven had certainly noticed, like we all had, the growing interface clutter around the core Office apps, and he thought we should put a set of people together and at least think about this. But I sometimes think that he didn't really expect us to actually replace the entire UI!

"Maybe Steven asked for a lot so we would deliver more than just a little, because it would take a lot to budge people from the way things had been for 20 years. Perhaps his thinking was to ask for a mile in order to get just 200 feet. But we ended giving him the whole mile, and then some".

Julie Larsen-Green: she changed the way Office 2007 looks and works, and now she's got the same job on the Windows 7 teamHarris recalls that Larsen-Green was a staunch advocate for rethinking the way Office worked and, more importantly, that way users wanted it to work. "She recruited me to do something bold to change the UI of Office. I was very sceptical at first - my feeling was that we would never be bold enough to actually make a real change, that really what we were talking about was doing some other incremental bandaid on top of the way things used to work. (But) Julie really sold me on the idea that she was really serious about trying to understand the problems with the UI, and if we can understand it and can come up with the idea, that we can go and do it."

Of her new role in the Windows team, Harris observes "Julie is definitely a champion of building great user experiences, and I know that in Windows she'll be looking to do the same types of things that she did in Office, which espouse great design values. Whether or not that means we'll see such a radical overhaul of the UI in Windows 7, I think it's too early to say".

Two things are certain: Sinofsky is a serious agent of change for the Windows OS, and Larsen-Green hasn't been brought into the Windows 7 UX team to keep things the way they are.