Microsoft has confirmed that there will be no further public beta versions of Windows 7, and that it is now preparing the Release Candidate (RC) build.

However, the company has yet to give an exact date for the operating system’s final release, other than sometime in the second half of 2009.

The disclosure came in an end of January update to the Engineering Windows 7 blog by Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice president for Windows.

Sinofsky wrote that the next milestone for the development of Windows 7 will be the RC, to be followed by the release to manufacturing of the final code and then general availability in retail and on new PCs.

The beta of Windows 7 was made available on 8 January following an earlier pre-beta distributed at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in October 2008.

The move means that Windows 7 will have had only one official beta before the full version ships, in contrast to recent versions of Microsoft products such as Windows Vista. This is because the company has taken a different approach to development with the new platform, according to Sinofsky.

Rumours have emerged that we may see Windows 7 Released in time for Christmas 2009. But as with all Microsoft OS’s there are bound to be delays.