Evaluating Prerelease Code

The Sept. 2005 release of WinFS has been dubbed “Beta 1,” but it has many characteristics of a Community Technology Preview (CTP). The difference affects which customers will want to evaluate it, and what they should expect to see.

In the past, a beta release of a product would typically be code- or feature-complete: all of the features in the product would be present, even if some of the features still needed significant polishing and testing to ensure they would work as designed. But many prominent beta releases, including Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and WinFS, have not been feature-complete: major features and user interfaces were not included in early beta releases of these products, and significant features were left to later betas and release candidates.

The first public prerelease version of WinFS is closer to a CTP-an interim release of a technology still under active development. Microsoft will often release several such CTPs in a relatively short period of time, each with new features and incremental changes.