Microsoft Canada president Phil Sorgen tells ComputerWorld Canada that his company has deliberately not set specific release date in an effort to ensure that the product release is not hurried by a date commitment.

Through an effort called 'trustworthy computing initiative,' Microsoft applies a security development lifecycle process in product development, says Microsoft's chief privacy strategist Peter Cullen. The security development lifecycle process came as a result of work done by 8,500 Microsoft developers some four years ago, tasked to dismantle every line of code on Windows Server 2000 and fix vulnerabilities that were found, Cullen says.

'From that we learned very clearly that there were certain things that can happen in developing code, particularly on something as complex as an operating system,' he says.

Windows Vista is going through that same security development lifecycle and part of the process is technical community testing and feedback through the Windows Vista Community Technology Preview.