Vista dates shifting

Well, I'm sure you've heard the news of Windows Vista's ship dates slipping from a lot of sources so I'm sure I'm not revealing any confidential information by posting about it.

From my standpoint, this is really frustrating. Since the Windows SDK has been committed to sim-shipping with the OS, our deadlines slip as well. As you saw in last week's post, we were slipstreaming for the old date, and were due to meet that deadline with a good quality product. Now for us we have a couple more weeks of dev time opening up. That's good in some ways, since it will give us additional time to work on features and bug fixes. But this extension is a little bit like being told you're going to run a half-marathon while in the middle of running a 10k race. You've planned your strategies around having everything planned for a certain end result, but now your result is different. The finishing kick is different, and the approach you take to the distance is different. It's an odd sensation.

The good thing for setup in the Windows SDK is that this will allow us to spend still more time drilling into bug-fixing. We have a fair number of open bugs at this point - everything from setting up new shortcuts to a setup failure on IA64 machines to the issue of how to manage low disk space when the user saves a very large file as the SDK is installing. Lots of small little things that you might not notice if they're fixed, but you would notice if you ran into them.

Setup's mantra for Beta 2 has been hardening. We want to remove as many points of failure as possible. We have a problem that our Feb CTP logs don't give sufficient information for us to track down errors. We've fixed that. We have low disk detection built in, finally. We're improving web download. This extension will allow us to do more things like that. We want setup to be something you can take for granted, not a source of anxiety. We're working on that. And this extra time will allow us to do even better.