Microsoft said it plans to release the first technical details about its forthcoming Windows 7 operating system, successor to the widely criticized Vista, at its developers' conference in late October.

"We will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7" at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference on Oct. 27 and also at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week, wrote Windows 7 engineering managers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, in a blog post Thursday.

The post was the first on a new blog Microsoft launched this week called Engineering Windows 7. DeVaan and Sinofsky promised that the blog will be a forum for "a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7.

"Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project -- picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality," the pair noted.

"We strongly believe that success for Windows 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," said DeVaan and Sinofsky.

In its attempt to improve communication around the Windows development process, Microsoft is clearly hoping to avoid a repeat of Windows Vista's shaky debut. Many application developers appeared to be caught off guard by Vista -- particularly its security features -- and as a result took considerably longer than planned to introduce Vista-compatible products.

Many enterprises have still not upgraded their Windows XP-based business applications to run on Vista, due to the amount of work involved.

Microsoft, however, has previously warned customers that Windows 7 will use the same basic architecture as Windows Vista, and that, as a result, applications that are not compatible with Vista also will not work with Windows 7.

DeVaan and Sinofsky said they hope the Engineering Windows 7 blog will help Microsoft manage expectations around the new operating system, which is set for release some time in 2010: "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."