Microsoft has made the Release Candidate of Application Virtualization 4.5 available for download. Even though the RC bits are accessible exclusively through Microsoft Connect, Andrew Montgomery, Senior Program Manager Microsoft Application Virtualization, confirmed that the development milestone is a public Beta. Application Virtualization 4.5, App-V for short, is the evolution of SoftGrid, a product Microsoft acquired back in 2006 together with Softricity. J.C. Hornbeck, Manageability Knowledge Engineer explained that the switched labels SoftGrid and Application Virtualization are also synonymous with the continuous growth of the solution.

"The Microsoft Application Virtualization team is very excited to announce that our version 4.5 Release Candidate is now available," Montgomery said. "Since the Beta release, we have added several new features, fixed bugs and made sure the product was ready to scale for enterprise deployments. Our TAP customers (selected customers who work closely with us to deploy the product into production prior to its final release) will be expanding their deployments to thousands of production users with this release in order to help us validate the product's full feature set, as well as performance and scalability."

Montgomery revealed that the work with version 4.5 is focused onto four areas of the product designed to deliver advanced administration capabilities, new deployment options, support for applications in languages other than English as well as support for Microsoft Security Standards. But, at the same time, testers will be able to notice enhancements introduced between the Beta and the RC builds in addition to the work being done in terms of Dynamic Virtualization, Extended Scalability, Internationalization, and Security Standards support.

"A lot has happened since our Beta release and we're excited to share it with you," Montgomery emphasized. Starting with Application Virtualization 4.5 RC, users will be able to stream virtual applications from IIS server 6 or 7 over HTTP. Microsoft streamlined the usage of the Sequencer with the adding of a new wizard, and modified App-V to permit the building of MSI packages straight from the Sequencer, also introducing the Dynamic Suite Composition feature. Montgomery added that the Release Candidate of Application Virtualization 4.5 also delivers: improved integration with SCCM 2007 R2, advanced reporting, new manageability tools, client cache improvements, new MSI package capability and compliance with Section 508.