Neowin.net

There have been so many dates flying around concerning the upcoming Release Candidate for Windows 7, and it's beginning to become a daily subject in the blogosphere. Just when you thought that we were going to see a Windows 7 RC by the end of February, a trusted source within Microsoft has informed Neowin that the RC will not be ready by the end of February.

At this time, Windows 7 RC is internally being tested and the official release date is set for April 10, 2009. The Windows team is right on schedule with development, and if there are no significant problems over the next few weeks the April 10, 2009 release date will remain in tact.

Not much information is available at this time. We're uncertain if the release will be a world-wide, and Microsoft is expected to do more testing before releasing a RC build to the public. With that in mind, TechNet and MSDN subscribers should be the first to receive the RC build. A recent email conversation between Paul, over at GeekSmack, and Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft Senior Vice President of Windows, revealed that there have been over 500,000 suggestions since the public launch of the Windows 7 Beta.

Sinofsky mentioned that, "recently we've seen people talk about 'RC Builds' and the like. First, all builds since the beta are RC builds since by definition that is the next milestone. But by far the most humorous element has been that the build numbers blogged about are higher than our current build. Today's build is 7046, but it hasn't completed yet :-)."

Other than the UAC fixes that were highlighted earlier this month, not much is known as to what has been changed or fixed in these internal builds, we'll keep you up to date with more information as it comes our way.

Update (1:14 PM -6 GMT): Emil Protalinski over at Ars Technica has apparently spoke with Steven Sinofsky, and he has said, "The build will be available broadly". This isn't a normal thing for Microsoft to do, however we will wait and see what Microsoft has in store for us in the coming weeks.