Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post Vista, Typed Datasets and Other Stuff, I was hesitant to adopt Vista due to known incompatibilities with some of the tools I use. Well that was before I had access to someone at Microsoft that had all the answers!

I am now happily running Vista Business Edition on my laptop and all of my development tools work just fine!  I took the rather extreme pre-caution of moving my previous laptop OS and all into a Virtual Machine first!

However my experience to date has been wonderful! I love the new Aero interface, and my system is actually more responsive then before I upgraded. Of course that's probably as much a function or essentially re-paving my laptop as anything inherently faster about Vista.

There are still some issues. Visual Studio 2003 is officially not supported, however Visual Studio 2005 and of all things Visual Basic 6.0 are supported! There is even a CTP release of a Visual Studio Service Pack specifically for Vista.

The release notes for the service pack are here and the service pack itself can be downloaded from here. This is meant to be applied after the standard SP1 has been applied to Visual Studio.

In order to be able to continue to work with Visual Studio 2003 and in order to avoid installing VB6 on my primary development system I created a new Virtual Machine using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. This VM runs Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and is kept current with all Microsoft Service Packs and Updates and has it's own copy of Anti-virus and other tools and utilities. Additionally I installed Visual Studio 2003 and VB6 and all the associated add-ons and documentation and tools and utilities I normally use.

Now I have a complete fully functional (and peppy!) development environment in a box! Complete with Internet access, Source Control, and all the rest of the things we all take for granted in a development environment.

The result is I have two, segregated, development environments, one for legacy app's and support and one for all my current work! Each environment is cleaner and leaner than if I had everything installed on one system.

And the learning curve for Vista was not all that great I was pleased to discover, it actually is more intuitive in many ways, and things were where they "should" be. The only application I could not get working in Vista (but it is working fine in the XP based VM) was PGP Desktop.

In conclusion I am very happy with my system and the performance and stability of Vista in general. And the eye candy of Aero is just frosting on the cake!

Cheers,

Robert Porter