LOS ANGELES—Microsoft Corp. Group Vice President Jim Allchin whipped through a lot of slides and information during his nearly two-hour keynote here at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference on Monday. But by the end of his talk, we didn't learn much more than we already knew about the ETA for Longhorn, which is currently expected to go live in 2006.

Microsoft distributed a Longhorn developer preview release to show attendees, consisting of two CDs including 32-bit and 64-bit IA-64 and AMD-64 code.

Attendees also received the Longhorn driver kit; Longhorn software development kit; Visual Studio "Whidbey" PDC build; SQL Server "Yukon" PDC build; and a version of Virtual PC 2004, which works with the Longhorn.

Don't expect to see the first true Longhorn beta until some time in the second half of 2004, however, Allchin told attendees. He refused to provide any further information on when Beta 2 or the final release might be ready.

He also warned attendees that they should expect to see "lots of warts" in the code they received Monday. "Performance is not good. You should put it only on high-end machines," Allchin said.

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