Windows 7 RC date official, XP mode unveiled

Last Saturday we revealed Microsoft seemed to have accidentally leaked the release date for the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) -- May 5. Well, a post on their Windows 7 team blog yesterday verifies it 100%, if you had any niggling doubts.

MSDN and Technet subscribers, as it was noted with the original "leak", will get the RC early, on April 30, we see now. Our guess then, is the original page put up on Microsoft's Partner Program website will go up that day.

On a somewhat related note, word has been spreading this past while about a "secret feature" planned for Win7, and the cat's now out. Windows XP Mode (XPM; formerly known as Virtual Windows XP) is what users can look forward to once the final version hits (as early as July), which some expect will have "serious implications for Windows development going forward".

XPM, in short, is a "Virtual PC-based virtual environment" which houses a fully licensed edition of Windows XP SP3, available as a free download to users of the Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. Needless to say, if you're serious about your work and/or gaming, one of these editions will be the one to get, if only for XPM.

However, we assume in the gaming department, XPM won't utilize onboard hardware, and so can't be considered a full-on solution on that front, but nevertheless, should prove useful to some extent, and hopefully sees expansion.

For those wary of Virtual PC products, XPM is very well-integrated into your system -- you don't actually have to run anything from a separate desktop (within your desktop); just install games or applications inside the environment, and they are published to Win7, too, with shortcuts showing up in the start menu, as you see from the screenshot above.

To sum it all up: you get two integrated OS' in one, and almost no worry of compatibility issues.

Paul Thurrott of Supersite for Windows explains what this means for the future of Microsoft's operating systems:

By removing the onus of legacy application compatibility from the OS, Microsoft can strip away deadwood technology from future versions of Windows at a speedier clip, because customers who need to run older applications can simply do so with XPM. For Windows 7 specifically, XPM is a huge convenience, especially for Microsoft’s corporate customers, who can of course control XPM behavior via standard Microsoft administration and management technologies like Active Directory (AD) and Group Policy (GP). And it significantly recasts the Windows 7 compatibility picture. Before, Microsoft could claim that Windows 7 would be at least as compatible as Windows Vista. Now, they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications.