Since build 4051, released in October, Microsoft has produced 10 to 15 more Longhorn builds but temporarily stopped daily builds in late December; that process is expected to ramp up again soon. We'll see a developer preview refresh build at Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2004 this spring and beta 1 in late summer.
For anyone who is interested in beta testing Longhorn, if you haven't previously been a Windows technical beta tester, don't expect to see a publicly available Longhorn build any time soon. Longhorn won't be generally available to the public until the beta 2 release, which isn't due until sometime in 2005.
Longhorn will include security-monitoring technologies that go well beyond similar, basic controls in XP SP2. In the Longhorn release, Windows will detect "irregular system behavior"--over the network or internally--and respond accordingly, Bill Gates said, calling the technology "Dynamic System Protection." This technology will also track which security patches have been installed, dynamically change the Windows Firewall configuration to fend off any detected attacks, and change network-adapter security settings when needed.
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