This article was published on May 31, 2012

Microsoft accidentally announces Windows 8 Release Preview for May 31st — a day early — then pulls blog post


Microsoft accidentally announces Windows 8 Release Preview for May 31st — a day early — then pulls blog post

In a post today on a Microsoft blog, Vice President on the Windows Development team, Chuck Chan, touted the release of the Windows 8 Release Preview to the Windows Dev Center. The blog post seems to have disappeared, perhaps because it was posted accidentally, but we have archived it below.

The post is dated May 31st, so it was obviously supposed to go out tomorrow. Specifically, it was posted to the brand-new-looking Windows Hardware and Driver Developer Blog, which is now empty of any posts. Whups.

The links provided in the post for the Windows 8 Release Preview and the other components of the Windows 8 development kit point to current releases. The links will likely go live tomorrow, when it was supposed to in the first place.

The post in full:

Welcome to the Windows 8 Hardware blog! I’m Chuck Chan,Corporate Vice President on the Windows Development team. We’re very excited to make available today the Windows 8 Release Preview on the Windows Dev Center.Windows 8 represents a leap forward for the Windows platform, the development tool set, and the device experiences you can build for Windows. We’re launching this blog to give you some insight into how we designed and built Windows 8, and to explore the best practices for developing great hardware and drivers, as you enter the new world of Windows 8 development.

The people contributing to this blog are the engineers
building Windows 8 and the tools and kits that support it. Our goal is to help
you get started by focusing on the “why” and “how” of building amazing PCs and
device experiences for Windows 8. Each blog post will present a development
topic and tie together information from the Dev CenterForumsMSDN Library, and where it makes sense, samples from the Windows Hardware Code Gallery.

We designed the Windows 8 platform and tools to help you
create high-quality drivers and Metro style device apps using an integrated,
modern tool set. Using the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) and Visual Studio, you can
write, build, sign package, deploy, test, and debug your drivers and apps
directly from Visual Studio. With the new Windows Hardware Certification Kit,
you can ensure the compatibility and reliability of your devices, and provide a
great overall user experience.

To get started, download and install Windows 8 Release Preview, the Windows Driver Kit 8, and Visual Studio Professional 2012. The Windows 8 SDK is also included with Visual Studio. As you begin using Windows 8, you’ll
notice that we’ve added new features and improved existing ones. In addition to
providing a modern tool set, we’ve also been hard at work improving power
management and refining the way you provide a great user experience for devices with Metro style device apps. We’ll share more
details in future posts.

The Windows Development team will post to this blog once
every one to two weeks until the release of Windows 8. Commenting is
encouraged, and we are looking forward to a lively conversation. Please apply
common courtesy and stay on topic with your comments. The Windows Hardware Community Forum is also a great place for hardware-related questions and discussion about
Windows 8.

We can’t wait to see the amazing devices and experiences
you’re building for Windows 8 come to life!

Chuck Chan, May 31 2012

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