Longhorn Alpha due next month

Client Server News is reporting that attendees at the upcomming WinHEC will get a new Longhorn Alpha release in their fancy little conference bags. That will make the grandski they spent for the show go down a little easier. It will basically be a refresh of the developer preview released at the PDC with a few more bells and whistles. CSN also pontificates that the much touted Beta release thought to be maybe end of this year will probably be summer of 2005 due to developer re-assignment to XP and windows Server Service Packs. CSN also confirms that more and more features are slipping from Longhorn to the next Windows release, Blackcomb.

So my predicted feature retreat is in fact starting to become public. The three support legs of Longhorn, WinFS (storage), Avalon (GUI presentation), and Indigo (message bus) look to be intact, although in some diminished form yet to be determined.