Windows 8 Download, Developer Preview

Microsoft today will release a developer preview of Windows 8 to the public. The developer preview will be available starting 8pm tonight Seattle time and will include 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Windows 8 plus development tools.It includes furthermore a suite of sample and SDK applications as well as the SDK. Microsoft notes that the apps provided with the developer preview are samples, and not necessarily apps that they plan to ship with the retail version of Windows 8.



Upgrades from Windows 7 are not supported, only clean installs which further indicates that this is a release not meant for production, as Steven Sinofsky puts it. It is also not a beta release of Windows 8.

Microsoft will update the release with “various quality updates and drivers over the coming weeks/months just to exercise our overall update and telemetry mechanisms”.

The ISO images will be available for download at the Windows Dev website. Interested users need to log in with their Windows Live ID to download the images to their computer system. The page currently returns a “page not found” error but should go life later this evening.

It is likely that some features of the new operating system have been disabled by Microsoft. This was the case in the past as well, and it will be interesting to see if users can work around those restrictions again to uncover features that have not been revealed yet by Microsoft.

Interesting to note is that developers will be able to code Metro style applications not only in HTML5 and JavaScript, but also in C/C++ or C#/XAML.

Today is the day where the Build Conference starts and Microsoft will be streaming the keynotes of Day 1 and 2 on the Build Windows website. Users from all over the world can tune in and watch the keynote live on their computer. The keynote can be viewed using Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin or directly in Windows Media Player instead. The keynote is currently being streamed.