I'm reading the white paper now.After months of speculation, rumor, and silence from Microsoft, the company is finally talking publicly about Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista.
Microsoft says that the first public beta of Windows Vista SP1 will be available in the next few weeks to TechNET and MSDN subscribers. The company confirmed that a smaller group of testers is already putting SP1 through its paces.
As to when the general public can expect to try a beta of SP1, the company only says that it will offer a prerelease version sometime after this second wave of testing, once the company considers the code stable enough to be essentially a release candidate. Assuming the second beta in September goes well, we suspect that a public preview will happen in November or December.
Microsoft has also published a White Paper on Vista SP1 that details many of its changes. I highly recommend reading through it. It indicates that SP1 will address administration and management features, security issues, real support for EFI, exFAT support, Direct3D 10.1, and the performance and compatibility issues recently released, among other things. If you pay close attention, however, you'll notice that the bulk of the planned updates were already addressed in the "performance" and "compatibility" packs that were released a few weeks ago.
Saying that quality must come first, Microsoft Product Manager Nick White said that the final version of SP1 is currently slated to ship in the first quarter of 2008, but that this date is only a target. "We'll determine the exact release date of SP1 after we have reached that quality bar," he wrote on the Vista blog.
Furthermore, since the Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 efforts are synchronized, the Windows Server 2008 team is also aiming for a release to manufacturing in the first quarter of next year. Let's hope this is the last delay for Windows Server 2k8.
Service Pack doesn't want to be a celeb
Microsoft is working hard to change perception about Service Packs, largely because the company feels they are overemphasized as critical OS updates. White points to Windows Update as the real venue for critical updates, and he noted that the performance, reliability and compatibility updates we told you about a few weeks ago have now been pushed out via Windows Update to Vista users.
White is indeed correct: the service packs of 2007 are quite different than those of 2000, now that Windows Update is mature and well-integrated into Vista. That doesn't change the fact that Microsoft still issues Service Packs, however. And let's face it, there aren't many Vista users out there disinterested in when they can get their hands on SP1.
EDIT:
I'm going to head off the inevitible comparisons with Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP1 and Windows XP SP2 with this quote from the white paper.
In key areas, Windows Vista SP1 will compare favorably to earlier Windows service packs. Windows® 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4) and Windows XP SP1 both made limited changes to the user interface and had limited impacts to application compatibility. Both service packs were small in download size. Windows XP SP2 was an exceptional case, as noted in the next paragraph. It significantly impacted the user interface and application compatibility, and was large in download size. While Windows Vista SP1 is still in beta, Microsoft's intention is that it will make limited changes to the user interface, have limited impact to application compatibility, and the Windows Update and WSUS download size will be small.
The purpose of Windows Vista SP1 is different from the purpose of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). Windows XP SP2 was a special update -- Microsoft recognized that it was in a unique position to address new and emerging security threats, and the service pack was the best answer. To address these threats, Microsoft incorporated significant, well-considered changes into the service pack, which had a significant impact on application compatibility. For example, the service pack enabled Windows Firewall by default, causing some applications to fail until the customer configured the exceptions in the firewall. However, Microsoft determined that the security benefit far outweighed any challenges the changes caused to end users and administrators. (Likewise, moving from Windows XP SP2 to Windows Vista introduced new, well-considered changes, such as User Account Control, which impacted compatibility).
