The first beta for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is live. Mid July was synonymous with the date Microsoft started to push the beta of Vista SP1 to what the company referred to as "a very small, very select group of advance customers." The selective pool of testers for the Vista SP1 beta ensures that the process is nothing short of air tight. Subsequently, outside of a few crumbs from the Redmond company's Vista SP1 beta feast, no details leaked. Sinofsky's Windows Omerta is working to perfection (Steven Sinofsky - Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group).

While Microsoft did admit the debut of the private beta testing stage of Vista SP1, AeroXP claims instead that the company is actually test driving a pre-beta release of the product. The drop date for vista SP1 beta was confirmed for the middle of the past month. In this context, the code released to a randomly selected group of limited testers is a build somewhere between alpha stage and the actual Vista SP1 beta.

Now, there is little secret of the fact that Microsoft is dogfooding Windows Vista SP1. The first screenshot of the next stage in Vista's life was leaked as early as May the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles. But there is a big step between the Redmond company running Vista SP1 internally and an eventual public beta of the service pack.

Microsoft revealed that Vista users should not expect a public beta of the operating system in the "immediate future." Such a release is only expected to be made available sometime by the end of 2007 with all hints pointing to no later than early November. And of course such a scenario supports the possibility that the final release of Vista SP1 will be delivered all the way in 2008, sometime after February.

Windows Vista SP1 shares the same core as Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn and the company did offer previews of what the service pack will bring to the table. Outside of upgrading the operating system's kernel to the version included into Windows Server 2008, and the altered default Windows Desktop search mechanism, SP1 will compatibility, performance and reliability updates as well as the evolution of DirectX 10 to DirectX 10.1.