Developers Will Get Windows 7 Alpha On Oct. 28 83
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."
Re:Vista/Mohave Remix (Score:2, Informative)
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:zomg! run! (Score:3, Informative)
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. :)