I’ve written extensively in the last few weeks about the feedback we’ve gotten from our Beta 2.  I hope you can tell we’ve heard your feedback, we are taking it very seriously and are committed to shipping a product that you love.  I’m grateful for all of the feedback you’ve given.  I’m also grateful to all of you who have been able to pick up Super-Limited Community Technology Preview (SLCTP) builds. As we look at the feedback we’ve gotten and the improvements we’ve made, we’re convinced we need another round of broad feedback.  As such we’re announcing some changes to the 2010 end game.  The driving force is the inclusion of a publicly available, “go-live”, supported Release Candidate in February.  We believe we’ll have the vast majority of the feedback addressed in time for the release candidate and will be looking for another broad round of feedback to ensure it is ready. We will also be producing an SLCTP3 build in mid January for one more private, non-disclosure agreement, round of validation by those of you who would like to validate that the highest priority issues have been resolved.  Given that the RC will only be a few weeks later, I’m not expecting too many people to opt for it, but at a minimum, we’ll be updating our internal dogfooders with it to ensure we are ready for the RC. As part of accomodating this public release candidate, we will be moving the planned launch date back a few weeks. Thanks ton for all the feedback you’ve given so far.  Please keep it coming and we’ll keep addressing it.

Brian