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Microsoft Confirms Windows 8 Beta Arriving February

A beta of Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 operating system will be released in late February, a Microsoft official confirmed on Tuesday.

Microsoft's Antoine Leblond, vice president of Windows Web Services, made the announcement during a talk about the upcoming Windows Store, the online selling presence for Windows 8 "Metro-style" applications, built on HTML 5, XAML, JavaScript and C languages. Prior to his talk, Microsoft had not made any public disclosures about the release period for the Windows 8 beta.

"We're going to open the Store to customers when we release the beta of Windows 8, and that's going to be in late February 2012," Leblond said, according to a Microsoft-produced and -edited video (below). His comment comes at the end, at approximately 3:16 minutes.


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Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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