Microsoft Corporation went public with some details about Windows NT 5.0 this week when it delivered a live demo of Build 1868 of its latest OS to a crowd at the Usenix NT Symposium. The company also demonstrated its NT Services for UNIX add-on package, which will be available in separate versions for Windows NT 4.0 and 5.0.
Windows NT program manager Tom Phillips says the company is within "100 showstoppers" of releasing Beta 2 of the oft-delayed OS, which is due soon.
"We are code complete across all areas, and are down to less than 100 total showstoppers. We hope to have Beta 2 out by the end of this month," he said.
According to a report on ZD Network News, Microsoft released Build 1859 to its private beta test, a release the report describes as a "Release Candidate for Beta 2." Beta 2 is widely rumored to be due on August 18th, when a group of NT 5.0 partners will attend a reviewers workshop in Redmond.
Microsoft even played it cute when NT Storage architect Felipe Cabrera joked about comments made in the press--including WinInfo--that the company would ship NT on time by simply dropping features. Despite the humor, it is still widely believed that this is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
"We're \[reducing the estimated 30 million of lines of code in NT 5.0\] by cutting features," Cabrera joked