Development of Windows Vista How to Find Build and Revision Number of Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 Installed Development of Windows Vista Development of Windows Vista occurred over the span of five and a half years, starting in earnest in May 2001, prior to the release of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, and continuing until November 2006. Microsoft originally expected to ship the new version sometime late in 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP (codenamed "Whistler") and Windows 7 (codenamed "Blackcomb" and "Vienna"). Vista's original codename, "Longhorn", was an allusion to this plan: While Whistler and Blackcomb are large ski resorts
Criticism of Windows Vista SPP's predecessor, and given at least one temporary validation server outage which reportedly flagged many legitimate copies of Vista and XP as "Non-Genuine" when Windows Update would "check in" and fail the "validation" challenge. Microsoft altered SPP significantly in Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Instead of the reduced-functionality mode, installations of Vista left unactivated for 30 days present users with a nag screen which prompts them to activate the operating system when they log in, change the desktop to a solid black colour every hour, and periodically use notification balloons to warn users about software counterfeiting. In addition, updates classified