Today, during the kick off of Microsoft's Windows Developer Day event, Kevin Gallo the companies Corporate Vice President for Windows Developer Platform, announced that the Windows 10 Creators Update Software Development Kit (SDK) is feature complete.
Since the current build of the SDK is 15021, released back on 03 February, that means the latest Fast Ring build being tested by Insiders, 15025 on both PC and Mobile, is also feature complete.
This is a significant milestone in the Redstone 2, aka the Creators Update, development process because it now means the Windows team focus shifts to fixing bugs and improving system performance as we approach general availability. That release is expected in April 2017 and the timing is right for this feature lock down to happen now as it gives about 4 to 6 weeks for dealing with bugs/performance issues. That of course means we are not done seeing builds for Windows Insiders for testing purposes either.
So far we have seen a total of 32 builds for PC (19) and Mobile (13) since August of last year when we started receiving Redstone 2 builds and if we see one build per week for the next 4-6 weeks then the number of PC testing builds will be comparable to the Anniversary Update numbers (26) while Mobile will be lagging behind (23) for the same cycle. Of course, that will all change if the Creators Update is pushed out in late April versus the beginning of the month.
If history is a good indicator, and depending on the official release date for the Creators Update to all Windows 10 users as I mentioned above, we should see a build in mid to late March that will be very close to what we used to refer to as RTM or Release To Manufacturing. For both the November and Anniversary Update releases, Windows Insiders received what was ultimately the release build of those updates in a similar time frame - 2 to 4 weeks prior to release of the update.
With Creators Update reaching feature complete status the final stage is being set for the release of the third major update for Windows 10 in April.
This also means it is almost time to expand my Creators Update testing devices pool and maybe install the next build on a couple more physical devices for more testing.
Will you be changing your testing foot print now that the feature set for the Creators Update has been locked down?
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
