For those who may stumble onto this blog and have no idea what I'm talking about, let me recap the events of the past week:

On Wednesday, July 27, 2005 at about 12 PM EST, Microsoft released the first beta version of the replacement to Windows XP, recently christened Windows Vista™ (formerly code named Longhorn). While the 27th had been designated as the internal release date for some time, Microsoft had previously established expectations for Beta 1 to be released on August 3rd, making the early release a somewhat obvious marketing ploy to counter the effects of many previous delays.

In an unusual turn of events, MSDN subscribers actually received access to the bits before many of the members of the technical beta team. I was able to download the bits immediately at speeds in excess of 400KBps, since less committed Vista enthusiasts were ignorantly twiddling their thumbs while waiting for August 3rd to roll around (ha ha). I managed to get Vista installed on my laptop (more on that soon) before leaving for the Oregon coast for the rest of the week.

Several days later, now that people have had time to play around with Beta 1 for awhile, it's time to start getting down to the business of testing applications for compatiblity, hunting for drivers, doing some WinFX programming, and giving the Windows development team the feedback that they both need and deserve. That's the purpose of this blog, to generate, communicate and collect feedback about Vista into a place that I hope will become a useful resource to anyone involved in testing, developing or just experimenting with Windows Vista. I hope you'll join me as I shadow all the latest developments on...