John Montgomery, a director in Microsoft’s developer division told News.com about the plans: “There will be a beta 1 of Longhorn…happening in the first half of this year,” he said. While the beta will not be ready for general public consumption, he expects that many people will start to investigate what is and is not in the beta.
Montgomery said Microsoft is on track for two other key releases for this year. The 2005 editions of the Visual Studio programming tools and the SQL Server database are slated to get new test versions in the coming weeks, with final releases scheduled for late summer.