Philip Rieck

Phil in .net

Longhorn available to non-PDC

To those of you not at the PDC, reliable sources (?) say that Longhorn will be available as a public beta (for an undisclosed small fee) in November, and to MSDN subscribers in December.

I wonder if this means that PDC-attending MSDN subscribers will see two different builds of the beta.  That seems like pretty quick turn-around for creating distributions, but it would be great - give me early bits, and keep the updates coming!  It's great that as a developer I get to see what I'll be writing software for soon (very soon for me), but not if what I get changes in major ways before release, and I never see the updates that are happening.

I wonder if the delay from public to MSDN is so that prolific copying by subscribers does not remove the need for the public to register and pay a small fee?

Posted: Oct 24 2003, 03:14 PM by philipr | with 9 comment(s)
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Comments

Kartal Guner said:

I'm sure that the longhorn beta will be available on the net the night it is handed out at the PDC.
# October 24, 2003 4:23 PM

Robert Scoble said:

Nope, all will be the same build.

You don't wanna get the newer stuff. Unstable again as teams start checking in more stuff.
# October 24, 2003 4:33 PM

Robert Hurlbut said:

From what I read earlier today, it looked like what Microsoft would be selling in November and what would be available through MSDN in December would be the same Alpha bits obtained at PDC. Any ideas which is right?
# October 24, 2003 4:36 PM

Kartal Guner said:

I would place my bets on Scoble.
# October 24, 2003 4:41 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Available for Download in November from MSDN and on CD (as part of the regular ship) in December.
# October 24, 2003 5:02 PM

Robert Hurlbut said:

Sounds great!
# October 24, 2003 6:07 PM

Dave said:

Um, funny. Reading the article you linked to - it quite clearly states "Beta 1 (due vaguely in the first half of 2004)".

Even more funny - that damn word "vague" used on something PDC related again.

But funniest - 6 comments and not one bothers to correct this obvious mispost about a "public beta".

And people wonder why some of us call this whole PDC overhyped....
# October 24, 2003 8:33 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Scoble mentioned something in his Hate microsoft blog entry about public testing and give feedback. You can't do that without a live product :)

However when the final is released in 2006, 2.5/3 years from now, I don't think the version handed out can even be called 'alpha' let alone 'beta'.
# October 25, 2003 6:25 AM

simon h fasheh said:

just let me test it already.J/k
xemik@netzero.com
# May 15, 2004 1:33 PM
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