Development Plan of Longest Ever Developed Operating System Microsoft Windows Vista

Initially the design of Windows Vista was started in March 2001 five months before the release of XP and the project was code named Longhorn. According to the plan this was going to be companies little step between Xp and Blackcomb which was supposed to be company’s next big release.  But as the time passed more and more new and advanced features and technologies which were being designed for Blackcomb was being incorporated on the longhorn platform which resulted in the release date being pushed back several times. Many Microsoft developers were given the task of developing updates for XP to not to create much hype about the company’s release in the market. For the same reason Microsoft on August27, 2004 announced that the company has changed its plans. The original Longhorn, based on the Windows XP source code, was scrapped, and Longhorn's development started anew operating system building on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 code base, and re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release. Features that were announced earlier the year like Win-FS were dropped from the system and a coding was on totally a new coding system to improve the long lasting problems of security in windows called Security Development Life Cycle.

The project Longhorn was given the name of Windows Vista in July 2005. After the announcement a comprehensive beta-test was started in which many companies and personals volunteered. In September the same year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to those testers which were working voluntarily for the test. Initially they were distributed to those professionals who were Vista called CTP present at Professional Developers Conference held in 2005. After that they were they were distributed to beta individual testers, other developers and organizations for only testing purposes. The developments after the testing were mostly  done on new and all the features that were going to be included on the new operating system. Some changes were also made in the user graphical user interface which was based on the feedbacks from beta-testers. Windows Vista was complete in features when the test version of Vista was released and the work done before the final release of the product was focused on stability, performance, application and driver compatibility and documentation.  In late May the same year another version of windows vista called Beta2 released on the internet through Microsoft Customer Preview program. It was used by over five million people.

Initially the plan was to release Windows Vista by the Christmas 2006 as a Christmas present for the people by Microsoft but it was announced in March 2006 that due date had again been pushed to January 2007 because the companies who are providing drivers of their equipment to Microsoft for Windows Vista need additional time to prepare their drivers. The bloggers, writers and analysts had already evaluated that the release of Vista would be further delayed because of the anti-trust concerns raised by the European Commission and South Korea. Another big reason was lack of progress after the last two beta releases. In November 2008 it was announced publicly that the development of Vista is completed.