(Milestone 2 Taskbar can be seen in the middle, image courtesy WithinWindows)

From the first ever Windows 7 builds to the RTM, the widely praised OS that recently hit the RTM development stage sure has come a long way. Between the many under the hood changes that improved stability and performance greatly over its predecessor, to UI improvements that improve productivity such as the revamped taskbar and Aero Snap, a lot of work was put into engineering 7, and evidently, what we see at the RTM stage wasn’t put together overnight.

Many builds were compiled at Redmond, and the features were slowly constructed and improved on until they became what they are today. It’s difficult to really catch a glimpse at Windows 7 while it’s being baked in Sinofsky’s oven, and many builds are yet to escape Redmond. While a Milestone 1 build (6519) and a Milestone 3 build (6801) leaked to the public, Milestone 2 was locked away in the vault.

Rafael managed to get a good look at the Milestone 2 superbar and he showed it off sandwiched between the M1 and M3 superbars. This post inspired me to go further into the rabbit hole and see more Milestone 2 goodness, and with the help of Rafael Rivera and Chris Holmes, I did just that. It’s worth noting that, for irony’s sake, this build of Windows 7 was bootcamped on a Mac Mini.

    (click to enlarge this and all other images in this article)

Milestone 2 is really a mash of Windows 7 and Vista together. The superbar consists mainly of a white gradient, with the start button/quick launch and system icons area having a 6519-esque gradient. Any toolbars (such as Quick Launch and the Windows Media Player toolbar) will occupy the black gradient area. You can also find the show/hide desktop button, which also triggers Aero Peek in this build.

You can also tell by the superbar’s clarity design-wise that Microsoft was drifting away from the “darker” design of Vista in favor of one that’s “lighter”. Something else that’s worth noting is that in this build, Aero Snap was much snappier, so to speak. The moment the window is dragged to the left, top, or right side of the screen, it snaps without there being an Aero glass preview showing the space that the Windows will occupy. In this build, the ribbon was not yet implemented in any of the Windows apps.

We have put together a video showing Aero Snap, Aero Shake, Aero Peek, and the Milestone 2 superbar in action. At this point, the current functionality of the superbar was pretty much in place, although slightly buggy as can be expected.

Libraries can also be found in this build. As Rafael mentioned, it’s harder to unlock the tasty bits in this build compared to 6519, likely because these builds left the shell team to have other work done (such as the implementation of Libraries).

Something interesting about the Libraries is the fact that to create a new Library, there was actually a wizard that you used to pick the folders to include.

In Explorer, there was a view called “smart details”. You can see it in action above.

Above, you can see screenshots of the Homegroups (or should I say home groups) feature in its primitive form. This PC, running the Milestone 2 build managed to pick up on the Homegroup created this morning on a system running 7077.

Here are some shots of the Control Panel in this build. 

Above, you can see Windows KeyRing, which appears to be the Windows Credential Manager in the RTM build. At the Milestone 2 point in time, Windows KeyRing was hardly functional; the only thing you could really do with it was create a new “KeyRing”, and if you attempted to do anything else, you’d get a dialog box similar to that in the second Windows KeyRing screenshot.

Above, you will find the “Manage Activities” window, which allows you to, well, manage activities for a feature that didn’t make it through to the RTM.

The start menu in this build had a different gradient when you hovered over the start menu items on the right hand side of the start menu.

It seems that at this point in time, Microsoft had a Windows Ultimate Extras window showing that they didn’t scrap the extras just yet. Either they didn’t care about removing the window, or they still planned to have the extras in Windows 7 at that point in time, perhaps scrapping it after much discussion on how much it contributed to the whole Vista PR flop.

That pretty much sums it up as far as any interesting (or somewhat interesting) finds are concerned. If you have any questions about the Milestone 2 build, feel free to comment on this post or share your thoughts on our discussion boards.