Microsoft News Tracker

As had been expected, Microsoft’s much delayed new client operating system, Windows Vista, was released to manufacturing today according to Jim Allchin, Co-President of Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division who tersely blogged, “It’s time!” (Video here.)

Some further details from the 11AM PST press call with Allchin (see also [1], [2]):

• 18 language versions at launch, 32 within 100 days
• Available for developers on MSDN within 7 days
• Available for volume purchase customers on or before the formal launch on Nov. 30
• Available at retail on January 30, 2007

There’s also an anticlimactic press Q&A here.

Update: Chris at LiveSide points to this post on the Windows Live OneCare 1.5 will also ship on January 30 with support for Vista.

Update Nov. 9: Also at Live Side, Kip Kniskern notes that the Windows Live Safety Scanner beta now supports Vista.

Rich Miller at Netcraft:

Microsoft has become an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, giving it the ability to sell domains directly to its customers. Microsoft has been reselling domain names from Melbourne IT, a registrar based in Australia that also provides wholesale domains to Yahoo and other hosting providers.

Microsoft’s could use its new status to sell domain names for its Office Live small business hosting service, which is scheduled to come out of beta on Nov. 15 and provides a free domain name with each account. This would probably save Microsoft money on each domain sold, as wholesalers like Melbourne IT typically charge a small mark-up over the base fees from the central registry.

That’s as good a theory as any, although Miller points out that Google and Amazon also became registrars but have yet to sell domain names.

The rumor of Vista RTM on Monday didn’t pan out, but Mary Jo Foley says today’s the real deal:

The day has finally come: Windows Vista is going gold. And the public announcement that Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing is going to happen tomorrow, November 8, around 11 a.m. PST, sources close to the company are saying.

The main course must be close, because yesterday we got the appetizers as Microsoft released the .NET Framework 3.0, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for the 2007 Microsoft Office system, ASP.NET AJAX and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition:

The technologies announced today include the following:

• The release to manufacturing of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, which provides advances for building rich, interactive client applications (Windows Presentation Foundation), communication and workflow (Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation) and online identity management (Windows CardSpace).

• The availability to MSDN^® Premium subscribers of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system on release to manufacturing.

• The availability of Visual Studio 2005 extensions for the .NET Framework 3.0, a series of plug-ins and project templates that enable developers to use Visual Studio 2005 to build .NET Framework 3.0 solutions.

• The release to manufacturing of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for the 2007 Microsoft Office system to build solutions for the six major applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system: Office Word, Office Excel^®, Office Outlook^®, Office PowerPoint^®, Office Visio^® and Office InfoPath^®. Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for the 2007 Microsoft Office system enables developers to build scalable, robust line-of-business applications that leverage the functionality of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

• Beta 2 of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and the Microsoft Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) Library (collectively called ASP.NET AJAX), formerly codenamed “Atlas,” is a free framework that allows developers to quickly create a new generation of more-efficient, more-interactive and highly personalized Web experiences that work across the most popular browsers.

• The release candidate of Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Compact Edition, a new offering for essential relational database functionality in a compact footprint. By sharing a familiar SQL Server syntax and common ADO.NET programming model with other editions of SQL Server, SQL Server Compact Edition allows developers and administrators to apply their existing skills and be immediately productive. The release candidate is available via download at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/compact.

All of the above are available now. Still in the oven however is SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2) for which a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) was released yesterday. It’s required for Vista because, as mentioned here previously, it provides SQL Server Express Edition which replaces the Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE) used by some Microsoft and 3rd party applications, but which is not supported on Vista.

Ensuring Vista application compatibility isn’t glamorous, but it’s critical for rapid Vista uptake (particularly in large organizations) and Microsoft is trying to ease the pain with the release candidate of the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5 which was just posted.