Microsoft News Tracker

It looks like there is more information to come, but here’s the Q&A:

Microsoft today marked a milestone on the path toward completing the Windows Vista programming model, WinFX, by announcing the availability of Go Live licenses for Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. Along with the WinFX January Community Technology Preview (CTP), these new resources are meant to give millions of .NET developers a leg up on next-generation application design. All three releases are available now from the MSDN Download Center.

It’s followed by the actual Q&A with Ari Bixhorn, Microsoft Director of Web Services Strategy. If you aren’t familiar with “Go-Live” licenses, they allow Microsoft customers to “go live” with Microsoft beta software in production environments and get minimal support. Not for the faint of heart even if the software has to be mostly complete for the licenses to be offered. As for the versions of WinFX, WCF (previously Indigo), and WWF promised, I haven’t seen them yet but I would presume they are for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 (or R2) and not Vista.

Update 6:40 PM: All of the releases are indeed just for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The WinFX release (labeled January CTP) doesn’t have a Go-Live license, but the new WCF and WWF versions (labeled Beta 2) do have available Go-Live licenses as described here. Microsoft has apparently detached them from the overall WinFX distributable. Since the Go-Live license doesn’t allow licensees to distribute the code, any deployments have to be entirely internal to the licensing company.

Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch has details on new features and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, aka Avalon) hasn’t been forgotten, but a Go-Live license is NOT being offered:

Microsoft is not releasing a Go-Live license for Windows Presentation Foundation because this software does not require the type of scalability testing necessary for the other two technologies, according to Microsoft.

Note that Microsoft also has a full support but limited participation Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for customers who want to try running pre-release software in production.