Now there's another announcement that puts some service updates for Visual Studio into question. Two of these were supposed to be delivered around this time: the first one back in April, the second one pretty much now. It looks like the first one won't be out until August, and there's been no word on when the second update will be delivered. Just service packs, true, but these contain specific feature updates that some developers are no doubt waiting for. Again, not a big ding for us system admins, but we'll undoubtedly hear about it from the developers.

So up until now, I was coasting along thinking I was doing okay. But then I helped Jamie Bernstein with our forthcoming review of Exchange 2007. This is where Microsoft's laissez-faire attitude toward delivery started to spoil my day.

The problem is that Redmond is dictating a 64-bit-only future for pretty much all of its back-server products once Longhorn sees daylight. I'm fine with that -- it's the natural evolution of server-side computing, so they might as well develop toward it and cut down on complexity. Besides, most folks lease their servers nowadays, so we're swapping out once every three years anyway -- it works out.

That is, it works out provided Longhorn ships on time. But it won't. Vista has already been pushed back and Longhorn will undoubtedly get pushed right along with it. Yet for some reason, back-end products such as Exchange 2007 are still shipping on time -- that'll be around November for Exchange 2007.

That means a 64-bit-only version of Exchange will be delivered several months before Longhorn. And this means anyone trying to run the thing as soon as it comes out will need to run it on Windows Server 2003 x64 ... until Longhorn comes out, at which point Microsoft will strongly suggest that you upgrade the OS.