Woohoo!  At TechEd on Monday, Bill Veghte announced that “…with the early RC testing and partner feedback we’ve received over the past few weeks, Windows 7 is tracking well for holiday availability”.  How exciting!  We should see RTM in 2009.

It’s been talked about a lot, and now you can play with it!  Windows 7 will have capability to provide an XP environment to support legacy applications, by using virtualization technology.  You need Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate to run it, however it’ll allow you to upgrade to the latest platform, whilst potentially being able to run XP applications, and run apps which wouldn’t normally run side-by-side together. 

Windows XP Mode provides a 32-bit Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (SP3) environment pre-loaded on a virtual hard disk. Client virtualization software, like Windows Virtual PC is a pre-requisite to use Windows XP Mode.  The above screenshot (from here) shows Office 2003 running in XP mode, with Office 2007 running on Windows 7, side by side.

Take a look here for the beta.