The Windows Vista Team Blog just announced that Windows Vista SP1 Release Candidate (RC) is available today on Microsoft Connect. Tomorrow it will open up to Technet and MDSN subscribers, and finally, next week, it will be available to the public through Microsoft’s Download Center. Availability for the final version of SP1 is still slated for the first quarter of 2008.

Among the information given about the release, the download is much slimmer than it was, presumably due to removal of debugging code. It also requires less space to install, and will properly notify you if you don’t have enough space. For administrators, there will be a ‘blocker’ available (information available tomorrow), to prevent the service pack from installing. Many of use made use of this when SP2 came out for Windows XP, allowing us extra time to test and plan deployment, without worrying that the pack would automatically be installed through Windows Update.

The RTM version (final release to manufacturing) will be available as a stand-alone installer for English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese, in both the 32 and 64-bit flavors. 8-12 weeks later, the remaining languages will be available.