Here's an interesting article

[Will Schuitman]

Thurrott; RC1 to be compiled today, release in early september

Paul Thurrott writes;

According to my sources at the company, Microsoft plans to
finalize Vista RC1 this afternoon. The build, 5568.16384, will ship
internally at the company today and will then be seeded to customers next
week if all goes well.

To give you an idea of how momentous an occasion this is,
consider that there were over 825 bugs in the Vista RC1 build tree as
recently as August 5. Today, that bug count is down to just 7, and none of
those bugs are showstoppers, or issues that would prevent Microsoft from
shipping the code to customers.

So here's the schedule. Microsoft plans to ship RC1 publicly
sometime in very early September, probably right after the Labor Day holiday
weekend. It will then finalize Windows Vista in mid-to-late October, and
ship it to its volume license customers in November.

Consumers can expect to see Vista in retail stores and with new
PC purchases beginning in late January 2007. As recently as a month ago,
this schedule seemed overly aggressive, given the problems we were seeing in
previous builds. Suddenly, unexpectedly, that's all changed.

 

[Guest]

Here is an even more interesting one the Vista RC1 is out for tecknet and tap.
This just in: Platforms and Services Co-President Jim Allchin has just now
posted an announcement that RC1 is complete on the TechBeta/TAP site (note
that it's password-protected). We’re reproducing the text here so that you
all can see his comments. As per usual, we’re initially rolling out the code
to the TechBeta and TAP programs alone, while MSDN and TechNet subscribers
will be offered access next week