As is the case with Windows 7, which Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, revealed would move straight from Beta 1 to Release Candidate, Windows Vista Service pack 2 will not linger in Beta stage. Microsoft in fact denied that it planned to offer multiple Betas of Vista SP2, indicating that the Release Candidate was the next stage for the service pack. The Redmond company emphasized that the availability of the gold edition of Vista SP2 was intimately connected with the quality of the development milestones in concordance with the feedback from testers via the Customer Preview Program.

“No multiple Betas for Vista SP2,” stated Erik Lustig, senior product manager in the Windows Business Group.

“We're seeing a pretty solid stability [for Vista SP2 Beta]. The way to think about it is that SP1 was pretty significant, pretty sizable, there was quite a bit of effort that went into that, and we feel very positively when we look at the telemetry data that we get back on Service Pack 1-based systems. We've seen compatibility improve drastically, and performance, and battery life. And we really feel we've delivered on the promise of what SP1 was going to be. Service Pack 2 is the idea of continuous improvement.”

At the end of December 2008 Microsoft made available for download the first public Beta of Windows Vista SP2, in conjunction with the bits for Windows Server 2008 SP2, as the Windows client and server operating systems had synchronized development processes since the delivery of SP1.

So far, Microsoft has not confirmed a public delivery date for the next development milestones of Vista SP2, and only pointed to the first half of 2009 for the availability of the RTM build. However, leaked information indicates that the software giant is gearing up for the Release Candidate of Vista SP2 in February 2009, following which the service pack will be released to manufacturing in April 2009.

With Vista SP2 “we're continuing to built on [SP1]. We've had some people say 'Hey, why is it so soon afterwards.' Quite honestly you're looking at just over a year after Service Pack 1. And so, we find that the ability for us to get more predictable with releases and to get those fixes rolled out for customers and out in that way it's a huge value, particularly in the IT pro community, where they're constantly balancing the number of fixes they have to ship, security fixes and what they're testing”.

 

Announcing Availability: Beta of Windows Vista and Server 2008 SP2