Windows 8 beta and RC on the horizon, updates to developer build

By Tom Warren, on 13th Sep 11 8:27 pm with 21 Comments

Windows 8 desktop

Microsoft’s Windows 8 develop schedule will include one beta and one RC before the RTM and general availability points.

Windows chief Steven Sinofsky revealed the schedule in a keynote address on Tuesday. The schedule is identical to Microsoft’s Windows 7 development plan. Microsoft didn’t hint when the beta would be made available but Sinofsky said the team is focussed on quality rather than dates. Microsoft is generally expected to announce a beta at CES 2012, the same schedule as Windows 7 followed.

One big difference with Windows 8 is that Microsoft plans to push out updates to the Windows 8 developer build. The updates will include standard defender updates but will also feature fixes for quality improvements. The updates will be delivered via Windows Update. Another change in the Windows 8 developer preview build is that the company will not require developers to use a key to activate the preview. Developers can simply visit Microsoft’s download site this evening and download the bits without registration or a key requirement.

  • Anonymous

    The developers at Redmond are really working their ass off, if you ask me.

    • Frylockns86

      Agreed. 10 years ago a development project such as this took them forever and they failed to deliver in a timely fashion. They have learned from their mistakes and have really changed the way I view the company.

    • Tom

      The had to learn one heck of a lesson with Longhorn/Vista.  I mean, that was the culmination of 20 years of development delays on Windows.  They’d simply gotten lucky for so long that they never really learned engineering discipline.

      –

      Windows 1.0 was supposed to come out early 1984.  By late 1985, people were cracking jokes about vaporware.

      Cairo took five years and *never shipped* a working product.  Microsoft managed to rescue parts of the code and put it into Windows 95.

      NT 3.1 was originally supposed to be OS/2 NT.  The project was *years* late, so late that RISC chips failed in the marketplace and Windows 3.0 came out in the meantime.  That’s why it targeted i386 as the primary chipset, and became Windows NT.

      Windows 2000 was originally supposed to be the unification OS, that combined the consumer Windows line with NT. The project was so late that they decided to release Windows 2000 as the last pure version of NT.  Plan B was to release Windows Millennium (the epitome of a rush job) and unify in a future version (which became XP).

      Finally, after 20 years of hacking away, it all came crashing down with Longhorn.  Longhorn could not be rescued by pushing back the release date, or paring down features.  The thing was so unstable that they threw away all the code and started over from the Windows Server 2003 codebase.

      –

      It wasn’t until Sinofsky took over that Windows was finally managed properly as an engineering project.

  • http://twitter.com/OmegaRa Shaun Sommer

    I will download and put it on an old dual core PC I have laying around, just to mess with it. :) can’t use the touch functions, but mouse will be fine for now :)

    • Maurice

      I put my copy on a P4 with 2G of RAM.  Then loaded VS2011 and it works fine.

  • Guest

    No date? I don’t understand very well. I really want Windows 8. So exciting

    • http://varemenos.com/ Varemenos

      Later today windows 8 developer preview will be released. Beta release will take some time

    • Guest

      Thanks! :)

  • Anonymous

    Windows 8 really looks to be the merging OS of PC’s and Tablets, I really look forward to it and it really pushes me to go back to school to learn some form of Computer Language to become at least some form of developer lol. I have always been the hardware guy and pride myself in tweaking it to perfection while also pushing any code written to the limit to find the hard to find bugs, sadly it seems to be a much harder marketable trade then it used to be. I need to get to some events and rub shoulders with some bigwigs to get my foot in the door on a marketing note. Just so dang hard with a real job that would be scary to leave for unknown waters. 

  • http://twitter.com/jlcsscljjlcs Jose Luis Canovas

    Could you announce by twitter or Facebook, the website and the time when we can download it?, thanks

  • Anonymous

    Tom, can you test something?

    I was wondering what would happen if you dragged your finger from the left onto the screen and then dragged it back off again and then back on. I think this would be a really cool way of choosing which app you wanted to bring back with the app switcher…kinda like youre shuffling thru the different apps. If its not a feature, I think it should be.

  • Kieran

    Did anybody get the samsung tablets at Build??

  • Frylockns86

    I wish my ASUS EEE-PC had a higher resolution than 1024×600. I would love to take the touch features for a spin. :(

  • Chris

    I assume the developer bulid  is for those who are MSDN subscribers..

  • Chris

    I assume the developer bulid  is for those who are MSDN subscribers..

    • Frylockns86

      No, it’s public.

  • Anonymous

    “The updates will include standard defender updates but will also feature fixes for quality improvements.” Does that mean we should expect bugfixes and even new features coming from Windows Update?

  • http://doctorwhofan98.wordpress.com/ doctorwhofan98

    I would get the developer’s build, but there are no Windows Live apps for it. If the Beta includes the apps, I’ll get that.

  • Steven Melton

    I wonder if I can install this on my CR-48 Chromebook? How exciting would that be. 

  • Keith

    Does anyone know if there is going to be a technical private beta like there was for the previous versions?

  • Thydreamwalker

    Jus’Plain Kool Apps and Start menu Needs work in accepting personal drivers to improve pc’s internal hardware-Testing and running WDP8 x64fullversion with appsupport and WDP8 x86 with basic apps  on  2 old MoBo’s 1gb-ddr on both pc’s with older amd athlon754-sempron939 cpu’s *** Wish 4 Windows8MediaCenter Setup to test TV functions????