Beyond Binary

Microsoft confirmed on Monday that it is planning to release Windows 7 this year, in time for the holiday shopping season.

"We are tracking well to a Windows 7 holiday," Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte said in an interview. Veghte plans to make a similar statement in a speech Monday at Microsoft's TechEd event in Los Angeles. As recently as January, Veghte was saying publicly that such a release was not a sure thing.

Images: A peek at Windows 7 release candidate

At the event, Microsoft is also announcing it plans to wrap up work on an update to its server operating system--Windows Server 2008 R2--at the same time it finishes Windows 7 on the desktop side. Microsoft issued a release candidate for the server operating system last month, alongside the near-final version of Windows 7.

For months now, Microsoft's official position has been that Windows 7 would ship by January 2010--the three-year anniversary of Windows Vista's mainstream launch. However the software maker has been aiming and planning for a 2009 release all along, as we noted last fall.

Computer makers have been indicating privately--and in a few cases publicly--that things have remained on track. But, with memories of Vista's delays fresh in its mind, Microsoft continued to hedge its bets.

Early feedback from the Windows 7 release candidate, which came out late last month, convinced Microsoft it could commit to a 2009 launch, Veghte said.

Veghte said Microsoft has seen the needed step-function drop in the number of crashes being experienced with the release candidate as opposed to the beta version.

"You know pretty quickly if you've got any big gotchas," he said. "You can get a pretty good sniff pretty quickly."

Equally important, Veghte said the company has seen the needed level of partner support. He noted that the first couple of companies have gotten Windows 7 logo certification. Among that first group are some graphics chip vendors--a big change from Vista in which limited graphics support was among the many compatibility headaches experienced by early adopters.

Veghte did not provide a specific time for launch or when the code would be finalized. However, he said that typically the ecosystem needs anywhere from nine to 14 weeks from the product being declared final to be ready for launch.

At TechEd, Veghte also plans to show a demo of how Office 2010 will take advantage of some of Windows 7's features. For example, Office will make use of a feature called "Jump Lists," which allow users to quickly take action directly from the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. From Outlook's Jump List, for example, users will be able to start a new message, create a contact, or schedule a meeting with two clicks.

Those that have both products will also be able to drag an Office file from a Jump List directly into an e-mail, a big time-saver.

A technical preview of Office 2010 will kick off in July, with those at TechEd among the first to get to try out the software.

At last year's WinHEC event, Microsoft Vice President Bill Laing talks about Windows Server 2008 R2, dwarfed by servers from Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

Microsoft said that the next version of its SQL Server database, to be called SQL Server 2008 R2, will work with up to 256 logical processors as well as add a set of business intelligence capabilities previously known as Kilimanjaro.

The software maker had previously described Kilimanjaro as an add-on to SQL Server 2008, but not a new version. In an interview, though, Microsoft's Robert Wahbe said Kilimanjaro will indeed be a new version of the product, though it will share the same code base as SQL Server 2008.

"It is new capabilities but it is also a new release," Wahbe said. "We haven't been changing the core. That's the reason we named it R2."

The move to support 256 processors in SQL Server coincides with a similar move that Microsoft had already made on the Windows Server side, with Windows Server 2008 R2.

As for Windows Server 2008 R2--the server version of Windows 7--Microsoft said that it will be finalized later this year, coincident to Windows 7 on the desktop side. At this week's TechEd event in Los Angeles, Microsoft is also showing several new features of the product.

That's a far cry from several past releases in which Microsoft was cutting features to try to meet shipping deadlines, said Microsoft's Ward Ralston.

"It's generally a conversation of what ended up on the cutting-room floor," Ralston said. Instead, Microsoft is actually discussing a few additional capabilities that it will include in Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft had originally said that its Hyper-V virtualization layer would support 32 logical processors; instead, Microsoft said it will support 64 chips.

Another addition is the ability to create clusters that mix different flavors of chips. In the past, clusters had to use the same revision of chip, while with Windows Server 2008 R2, clusters can be made up of machines using different Intel or different AMD chips, though they still can't combine the two brands.

"Now they can look to reuse some of that potentially couple-years-old hardware," Ralston said.