Windows 8 Pre-Release Build Available for Testing over the Coming Months

Microsoft is gearing up to broaden the pool of early adopters that have been testing Windows 8. 

A pre-release development milestone of Windows 8 will be made available to more testers than ever before in the next few months, Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division confirmed at the start of this week.

Of course, the Redmond company’s official confirmation comes a tad late, especially since there was already a general consensus that the software giant was preparing to broaden the testing program for Windows 8. 

The BUILD Windows conference, a Windows 8-centric event, is less than a month away, and Microsoft is expected to share some Windows 8 bits with participants, as well as with additional testers worldwide. 

Via the new Building Windows 8 blog, Sinofsky notes that Microsoft has started “an open dialog with those of you who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months.”

There’s no confirmation of the fact that Windows 8 bits will indeed be shared at BUILD. And at the same time, there’s no telling how advanced will the Windows 8 test Build be from a development process point of view. 

While some are expecting Microsoft to share Windows 8 Beta at BUILD, there’s no guarantee that this will actually happen. 

The company might as well offer a Milestone 3 (M3) pre-Beta Build of Windows 8 at BUILD, just as it did with Windows 7 at PDC 2008, and only subsequently launch the fully-fledged Beta of the next generation of the Windows client. 

“Building the next release of Microsoft Windows is an industry-wide effort that Microsoft approaches with a strong sense of responsibility and humility. Windows 8 reimagines Windows for a new generation of computing devices, and will be the very best operating system for hundreds of millions of PCs, new and old, used by well over a billion people globally,” Sinofsky added.

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