RC1 NAP is out the door; the road is clear

It’s me again, it’s been a few weeks since I posted; last Friday we officially signed off on 5600 as the RC1 build for VISTA/Longhorn Server and sent it out to our Beta and TAP customers. We are already seeing positive feedback (check out this InfoWorld article); after the long Labor Day weekend we’re back finalizing our RC1 step-by-step guides and working towards a quality VISTA release.

Personally I have been running VISTA at home for over a year now; I am a Media Center junkie and have been self hosting weekly builds; RC1 is a solid release and I think you will be impressed; we still have issues to resolve, but were well on our way.

I also wanted to tell you about some organizational changes. We are approaching the point of the development cycle where we re-align our resources to better enable us to execute on our future releases, with that in mind I will be re-focusing my efforts on Standard and Architecture related activities and Rob Trace will be taking over the Lead role for Layer 2 Authentication and Authorization.

In addition we recently had a opportunity to hire a new member to our Program Management team, Eran Dvir comes to us from Carnegie Mellon; he was our intern last year and will be taking over responsibility for IPsec NAP related technologies and scenarios.

I will see if I can get Eran to do a post later this month, introducing himself. In the mean time please share your RC1 experiences!

Ryan M. Hurst

Standards and Architecture

Windows Enterprise Networking