I recenty repartioned my drive and setup my machine to dual-boot XP and Vista Business RC (64-bit). Below is some insight into my experiences so far.
1) Most developer machine will be able to handle Vista just fine and completely new users will not be needed. My laptop is AMD (Athlon64), 1GB Ram, with an ATI video card (128MG Video RAM) and it handles Vista just fine, inlcuding Aero. I am gong to look into upgrading the memory to 2GB, but that is the only thing it looks like I will have to update.
2) The new interface is pretty clean, but it will take getting use to, but once you have used if for a while it you get start to get the hang of it.
- a) I wish MS would display a non-expanded file list instead of automatically exapanding the users folder. The bad thing is they are not consistent. If you right click my computer and choose explore the file list is not expanded, but all other links to explorer do expand the file list. This is one thing I hated in prrevious versions of windows and it is the same in Vista. At least the could to is make this configurable.
- b) The toolbar / gadgets toolbar window needs to have some additional configuration options (Undockable, Dockable on top/bottom not just left/right, the ability to disable/hide it.
3) Vista found most of my drivers including my ATI video driver (which XP64 did do, and getting the driver was terrible). Still working on finding 3 of the drivers and will keep everyone posted on the status on my blog.
4) Some 32-bit applications that I have had compatibility issues are:
- SnagIt: Vista actually informs you of compatibility issues, and when printing opens up snagit in a seperate OS window. The snagit print driver also seems to interfere with my netwrok print driver.
- Firefox: Cannot save any of my preferences. Have uninstalled and will try reintalling it to see if there was just a problem with the install.
- AVG Anit-Virus: Of coure this does not work since it is 32-bit, but I wish there were more free 64-bit Anti-virus programs avaible. The only one I have foudn is Avast! and it works pretty good.
5) My biggest grip is that SQL 2005 (64-bit) has known compatability issues running under Vista, and at this late in the game (RC) Micorsoft's 64-bit version should not have any compatibility problems running under Vista.
6) IIS 7 / IIS 7 mamangement console: The new management console is totally different and will take a lof to getting used to. Just trying to find where to set different setting is hard. They have added more support for .Net and there are new sections where a lot of .Net setting can be set from within IIS. Again, learning what .Net settings can be set and where they are will take time to learn. The Business version does allow you to have more than one web site, which is really nice (no more IIS Admin.Net).
7) The new search feature is nice, especially the added ability to also search online content as well. This is also true of the Help for Vista, which also will search th web for the topic you have requested help for.
8) VS.Net 2005 seems to work fine under Vista, and I will update everyone on how DNN worked under Vista / IIS 7 as soon as I get a chance to check it out.
Overall Vista looks very promising and I plan on upgrading as soon as it is released. The biggest unanswered question I have right now it whether to upgrade to the 32-bit or 64-bit version. Unless some of the tools I use come out with 64-bit verisons (or at least 32-bit compatible versions) I will probalby have to go wiht the 32-bit verision of fine adequate replacements (I cannot live without snagit). If you have a big enough drive that you can create 2 partitions and dual boot, I would highly recommend it. It will allow you to see the new interface, test the applications you use while still having access to your old OS/applications. A good free program I found for repartitioning drives is called GPart LiveCD.