And for my encore... Sleep.

As you've almost certainly heard by now, we've finished.  Windows Vista has shipped, and our mantle has passed on to the manufacturers, who now have a little over two months to stuff a hundred million DVDs into boxes and put them onto store shelves everywhere.

For those of you outside the company, this date really doesn't mean much, because you still won't see the finished product until it's out on a store shelf.  But internally, it's cause for celebration.  All of the programming is finished, and the developers are now moving on to the next version.  There's a pretty good Q&A with svenh up on presspass about what this means.

A couple weeks ago, Larry Osterman posted on a game he dubbed Last Checkin Chicken.  What he didn't know when writing up that post was how close the "winner" would be.  The apparent last checkin was a hardware compat fix by a dev on the audio team.  Not only that, but the bug was found with one of my test apps, so I'm close to it.  There's a part of me disappointed that I didn't help find this one sooner, thus saving the notoriety of being last, but mostly I'm just glad we were able to get the fix into the product at all.

I think November and December are going to be pretty dead around here.  We're in the planning stages for the next Windows, but now is the time that many people will take long-overdue vacations, put off during the ship stages of Vista.  With all these developers coming down from crunch time, one of the other devs here suggested that now would be a good time to sell your coffee stock.  Me?  I'm going to sleep in for a few days.