Windows 7 = Kernel version 7.0? No way.

I just read another bit of drivel about Windows 7, referring to an MSDN article on drivers that mentions “Msft.NT.7.0″ and asking:

Has this changed? Is “Msft.NT.7.0″ just a way of expressing Windows 7 and not kernel version 7, if not, why not just say NT.6.1 in the INF? Or is the documentation incorrect? It remains to be seen.

Let’s see if we can get this straight. Windows 7 is so close to Release Candidate status, so close to shipping, that we won’t see any changes at all from the current builds, except ones directly affecting stability and preventing data loss. Changing a comma in a dialog box at this point is a Real Big Deal.

The only reason why I mention this (again) is that Brandon, a Microsoft employee, shot back on the blog:

We named it Windows 7 from the beginning, it wasn’t even marketing that originally chose that brand, it was our internal “code name.” The builds were versioned at 7.0. It broke compatibility for too many apps/drivers, so we changed the versioning APIs to report 6.1 to reflect the level of compatibility that should be expected by pre-existing software.

I thought we’d been over this. Windows 7 is Windows 7.0. There are far more important things than driver architecture that change (and hell, there are driver architecture changes in Win7).

So no, there is no “Windows 6.1 kernel” and never was. There’s just the Windows 7 kernel. This is how it’s always been, this article is just silly.

Bravo. It’s refreshing that MS finally allows its employees to stand up in public and shout “BS” when the “news” being spread is just garbage.

Brandon deserves a raise…