Windows 7 has made it up all the way to Build 7269, with Microsoft getting closer and closer to releasing the next iteration of Windows to manufacturing. The Redmond company indicated recently that the RTM deadline of Windows Vista's successor should be expected in late July 2009. In this regard, there are a few more weeks to wait until the company will warm up the development process and produce the Windows 7. Even though the software giant has failed to deliver a specific deadline, there are several clues pointing to the proximity of the RTM.
First off,
Steven Sinofsky, formerly senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, has already been upgraded to the new position of Windows Division President. And, secondly, there's an eerie quiet on the Windows 7 front, undoubtedly the quiet before the RTM storm. From the
RTM-branch, Windows 7 Build 7264 was the last development milestone leaked and made available for download. Microsoft produced Windows 7 Build 6.1.7269.0.win7_rtm.090706-1900 on July 6, 2009 (according to Wzor), but this milestone has not made it into the wild yet. No telling at this time what is going to be the final build version of Windows 7.
Microsoft's
Larry Osterman revealed that the build version was not inside knowledge. “For Windows 7, we’ve seen a number of jumps in build numbers. The PDC build was build 6801, the Beta build was 7000 and the RC build was 7100. It’ll be interesting to see what the final build number will be (whenever that happens). I honestly have no idea what the number’s going to be.”
Still, Osterman did manage to offer an interesting perspective over just how Microsoft associated build numbers with its Windows development milestones. “The Windows version is actually composed of a bunch of different fields, all packed into an OSVERSIONINFO structure. The relevant parts of the OSVERSIONINFO are: Major Version (dwMajorVersion); Minor Version (dwMinorVersion); Build # (dwBuildNumber). The major and minor version numbers are primarily marketing numbers – they’re broad brush fields that the marketing department decides are appropriate for the OS. For Windows 7, the major and minor versions have been fixed at 6.1 for many months now, but the build numbers change more-or-less daily.”
Before Windows 4.0, the Redmond company did things a tad differently. Windows developers would simply sum up figures in accordance to how many days had passed since the previous release was offered. “Windows NT 3.1 was build number 511, NT3.5 was build 807, NT 3.51 was build 1057, NT 4.0 was build 1381,” Osterman recalled.
After NT 4.0, the Windows project adopted the same system as the Exchange team. “The Exchange build numbers were rounded up to round numbers for major milestones in the product. So Exchange 4.0’s RTM version was 4.0.837 but Exchange 5.0 started at build 1000,” he stated. This is how Windows 2000 ended up as Build 5.0.2195. And Microsoft continued with the strategy moving forward, turning it into a tradition. This is how 5.1.2600 was the build for Windows XP and 6.0.6000 for Windows Vista.
