A blogger with Microsoft's Driver Developer Blog, none other than Chuck Chan, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Development team, jumped the gun in revealing the availability of Windows 8 Release Preview. The now-redacted blog post was screen-grabbed by Neowin.net, and pins the availability of the latest iteration of Microsoft's next-generation operating system to later today (May 31).

Entitled "Windows Hardware and Driver Developer Blog," the blog post by Chan focused on areas of driver and system software development ahead of the operating system's market launch. Windows 8 Release Preview would serve as a fairly reliable platform for developers to test their system software on. A transcript of the blog post is quoted below. Download links to Windows 8 Release Preview, Windows 8 Driver Kit, and Visual Studio 2012 Professional can be found after the break.DOWNLOAD: Windows 8 Release Preview | Windows 8 Driver Kit | Visual Studio 2012 Professional

The above links become active later today. A transcript of the blog post follows.

Welcome to the Windows 8 Hardware blog! I'm Chuck Chan, Corporate Vice President on the Windows Development team. We're very excited to make available today the Windows 8 Release Preview on the Windows Dev Center. Windows 8 represents a leap forward for the Windows platform, the development tool set, and the device experiences you can build for Windows. We're launching this blog to give you some insight into how we designed and
built Windows 8, and to explore the best practices for developing great
hardware and drivers, as you enter the new world of Windows 8 development.

The people contributing to this blog are the engineers building Windows 8 and the tools and kits that support it. Our goal is to help you get started by focusing on the "why" and "how" of building amazing PCs and device experiences for Windows 8. Each blog post will present a development topic and tie together information from the Dev Center, Forums, MSDN Library, and where it makes sense, samples from the Windows Hardware Code Gallery.

We designed the Windows 8 platform and tools to help you create high-quality drivers and Metro style device apps using an integrated, modern tool set. Using the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) and Visual Studio, you can write, build, sign package, deploy, test, and debug your drivers and apps directly from Visual Studio. With the new Windows Hardware Certification Kit, you can ensure the compatibility and reliability of your devices, and provide a great overall user experience.

To get started, download and install Windows 8 Release Preview, the Windows Driver Kit 8, and Visual Studio Professional 2012. The Windows 8 SDK is also included with Visual Studio. As you begin using Windows 8, you'll notice that we've added new features and improved existing ones. In addition to providing a modern tool set, we've also been hard at work improving power management and refining the way you provide a great user experience for devices with Metro style device apps. We'll share more details in future posts.

The Windows Development team will post to this blog once every one to two weeks until the release of Windows 8. Commenting is encouraged, and we are looking forward to a lively conversation. Please apply common courtesy and stay on topic with your comments. The Windows Hardware Community Forum is also a great place for hardware-related questions and discussion about Windows 8.

We can't wait to see the amazing devices and experiences you're building for Windows 8 come to life!