David Zipkin, senior product manager in the Windows Client group at Microsoft, has committed to releasing the beta version of Vista service pack 1 "in a few weeks."

On the Vista team blog, his colleague Product Manager Nick White wrote: "We're targeting releasing SP1 to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008, but as always, we're first and foremost focused on delivering a high-quality release, so we'll determine the exact release date of SP1 after we have reached that quality bar."

White added:

"(FYI, in case you didn’t already know: the Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 engineering efforts are aligned, so the Server team also said on their blog today that they are targeting the first quarter of 2008 for their release to manufacturing.)"

He recommended that, in the meantime, developers and users could check out the Windows Vista SP1 white paper for more detail.

Much had been made recently of what will or will not be included in SP1 and when it will be released (some accurate, some otherwise). So it is good to have Microsoft itself setting the story straight: they're already well into the process of developing and deploying a Beta version of SP1.

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