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Microsoft has set two dates in October in which it will provide in-depth technical information about the product: The Professional Developers Conference on 27th October and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference which will take place the following week.

According to senior engineers Steven Sinofsky and Jon De Vaan, Microsoft is taking an "open and honest" approach to the operating system's developments, in order to manage expectations before it goes on sale.

"We strongly believe that success for Windows

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7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows," the pair said in the blog. "We promise and will deliver such a dialog (sic) with this blog."

The pair admitted that the Microsoft engineering team learnt lessons about disclosure from its last big launch; Vista. They confessed that the team has learned that sometimes "we can all too easily get ahead of ourselves in talking about features before our understanding of them is solid".

In contrast to Vista, this time the team is taking a different approach with Windows 7 to make sure that it has a reasonable degree of confidence in what they talk about when they do divulge details.

"Related to disclosure is the idea of how we make sure not to set expectations around the release that end up disappointing you-features that don't make it, claims that don't stick, or support we don't provide," said Sinofsky and De Vaan.

"Starting from the first days of developing Windows 7, we have committed as a team to "promise and deliver"," they concluded.