Windows Vista nears RC1, Customer Previews to be reinstated

It’s old news by now that the development of Windows Vista has been a long and laborious process. Still, despite missing the crucial Christmas 2006 season, things look on track for the planned consumer release of the operating system in January 2007. A Microsoft blogger dropped some hints yesterday about future plans for the first Vista release candidate.

The last widespread public release of the OS was Beta 2, which while functionally complete, still contained many annoying issues for testers, especially with third-party software. Beta 2 was based on Build 5259, but the operating system has come a long way since then. Two Community Technology Preview builds were released to users in the CTP program: the December CTP (5270) and the February CTP (5308/5342). Nick White, the Microsoft product manager who announced the news about RC1, says that he is personally using Build 5505, which is a newer one than RC1 will be using. Build numbers are ostensibly a record of how many times the operating system has been fully compiled, although sometimes they will make major numerical jumps for significant releases.

Full article: Ars Technica