I've been eagerly waiting for Microsoft to release SP1 for Vista but decidedly against the idea of running it on my laptop until it's completely out of beta and officially released. (I deal with enough buggy software every day without having to go out and look for it.)  All of this changed this weekend while I was working on a Windows 2008 Server Terminal Services demo.  When I went tried launching remote applications from my laptop I got a message informing me that I must be on Vista SP1 or XP SP3.  With much mumbling I broke down and installed SP1 RC on my laptop.

Three hours later when the process was done (that included download time) I noticed something very interesting.  My Vista desktop was now showing that it is running Build 6001.

This build number sounded suspiciously familiar so I went poking around my lab servers.  Much to my utter amazement I found that the build numbers were identical too my Windows 2008 lab boxes.   

I knew that Windows Server 2008 was built on the Vista SP1 code base but I never realized how truly tightly coupled they were until now.   This is is one of the sneakiest and most brilliant things that Microsoft is done in quite a while.  They now have hundreds of thousands quasi-professional consumers testing their server product.

Anybody care to bet on a release date for Vista SP1?  I'm going to put it within two weeks of the release of Windows Server 2008.