The “Break it Down” Blog

eWeek reports that Microsoft is prepping the release of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 due for release to a controlled group of around 15k people very shortly (next month?). The goal is to get the final QA’ed copies of the respective service packs out in vendors and customer’s hands Q1 of ‘08 and give the remaining months for testing, repairing and tightening up the service packs.

Vista’s application security model is set to get a bit of an overhaul in SP1, while the UI will stay largely untouched:

Microsoft is going to do its best to limit any impact on application compatibility with SP1 and plans to add some shims to improve this, said Zipkin, who also noted that the service pack will include a change to the way applications communicate with the Windows Security Center.

Starting with Vista SP1, application developers will have to use a new set of APIs to provide status updates to the Windows Security Center rather than using the Windows Management Interface. They must also embed an application manifest with the application and authenticode sign the reporting application, Zipkin said.

So for the folks in the crowd hoping that SP1 revamps Vista to actually make it a decent OS, the 50MB SP will tweak it slightly, but nothing like Windows XP SP2 did for Windows XP.

Let’s hope in ‘09 when Vista SP2 lands, it makes some more changes. Then again, Windows 7 is due out in ‘10 anyway… so the lifespan of Vista is hardly carved in stone anyway.