Microsoft have just announced that Vista will be delayed and won’t be generally available until the beginning of 2007. Read the official announcement.
This doesn’t really surprise me. Since November 2005 we have been working with the Vista beta releases to ensure Macro Scheduler will be Vista ready. Finding the information we needed to achieve this has been difficult and it is clear that much of the SDK and documentation is still not complete. In the end I had to get in touch directly with the Vista UAC team at Microsoft in order to make any real progress. It is clear that there is still a lot of work to be done and I just couldn’t see Vista being ready by the end of the year. Vista makes a complete paradigm shift in security by restricting default user accounts to standard level privileges. The discussion in the developer newsgroups makes it painfully clear that this will have huge implications on many existing applications and the way Windows software has been written in the past.
Delaying the general availability of Vista until 2007 has got to be a good thing. It is better that Microsoft concentrate on quality and get things working properly than rush the release out. Developers also need time to assess the implications and work on compatibility changes and for many this delayed release will cause a sigh of relief.
