Microsoft has set a date for a second Longhorn-themed Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The event will be held in September 2005, almost two years after the company first detailed the Windows XP successor at the 2003 PDC.

Longhorn has undergone a lot of changes since the unveiling. Microsoft has sacrificed some key advances it had planned for the operating system to be able to make a 2006 ship date. Also, Microsoft now plans to offer updates for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to support technologies that previously were reserved for Longhorn.

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I don’t think we need to wait all that long to start seeing some evidence of Longhorn. If Microsoft has a hope in (well, you know where) of getting it out the door on schedule, then we should really see the first beta teams on it by March at the very latest. Given that XP64 is due for release around that time, it makes sense. Once Windows XP64 is out of the way, then there’ll be a larger pool of beta testers available.

And one thing I feel very sure about is that Microsoft will use as large a number of beta testers as they possibly can. If there are major flaws in Longhorn of any kind, it would be suicide to let it out the door, only to plead insufficient testing.