Rants Tagged with “Vista”
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Come and get it. The newest drop of the Visual Studio Tools for .NET 3.0. Make sure you get the .NET 3.0 Runtime (and SDK) and the Visual Studio Workflow Tools RC5 while you're at it!
NOTE: No WCF Designer in this drop and Cider (the WPF designer) doesn't work in VS Express.
Interestingly Windows Media Player 11's visualizations in Vista don't seem to be Video Hardware accellerated. While I understand that Windows Media Player 11 needs to be backwards compatible, it does make the visualizations looks ugly compared with the rest of the OS. Hopefully they'll change that for Vista RTM, but for now that are just plain ugly (and CPU hogs).
I like this tweak guide a lot (there are other places to find this info too if you need).
WARNING: It tells you how to turn off lots of security features that were added because they were important. Since its not a release version there are some problems with these security features so its nice to get around issues, but do use them with care.
If you upgrade to RC1 be aware that SQL Server 2005 requires SP2 before it will work with Vista RC1. Yeah, I know there is no SP2...but that's the case. It just doesn't work. I am trying to hack around the problem so I'll let you know if I find a solution...
I really like the realtime (or near real-time) preview of the windows on the Taskbar in Vista. Check it out:
Here is an interesting article on how Aero works over Remote Desktop even if the remote machine can't run Aero. Everything is rendered on the client...interesting:
I spent the weekend downloading and upgrading my main XP box with this pre-RC1 test build. Yes, I said upgrading XP! The good news is that is build is very very good. Not perfect, but very good! I am able to use it as my main box.
I have tested VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, MS Office 2003, and even games (ok I am addicted to WoW). All of these programs worked. The only problem I had was that I wasn't granted access to my old Documents folder, but I would guess that has more to do with the fact that I changed the location of the folder with TweakXP.
When the RC comes out, I think it will be close to ready for prime time. I am psyched.
I know this has been all over the blogosphere by now, but I wanted to make sure people knew about Windows Genuine Advantage being snuck into Windows Update. Here is a ZDNet article that walks through Windows Update to show how deceptive the install is. I am disappointed in Microsoft over installing this tool via Windows Update. While I don't work for Microsoft, I am a fan of what they do in general.
The problem with WGA is that it is an anti-piracy measure, not a security update. The idea is to have users trust Windows Update and turn it on so they can't get hacked, right? By trying to sneak this onto computer systems to see if they are genuine, they are undermining the trust factor for most users. Through the generosity of Microsoft (through their MVP program), I have legal versions of Windows running throughout my network. But I still didn't install WGA. Why? Its the principle.
My less techinically savvy friends are going to see this on a news site or other place and think twice next time there is a Windows Update alert. So they won't install the update and they get comprimised. They they think Windows in an inferior product. Is this going to help Microsoft get more Windows licenses? Nope. They consider an iBook next time.
Microsoft, think this more next time. I am disappointed...
After my recent rant on Vista not being ready, I did want to mention a couple of great things I saw in Vista that I haven't heard about before:
- Build-in games look like they've been re-written in WPF. They look really nice and scale up well.
- New Disk Manager allows for resizing partitions on the fly. WOW. Doesn't mean Partition Magic is dead, but for simple resizing of partitions, this is really great.
- I really like the new User sections (better than the nasty nested c:\Document and Settings\... fiasco).
I am sure I'll think of more as we go on, but so far I am looking forward to Vista's release.
I spent the majority of yesterday moving my primary laptop to Vista. I got a new 100G/7200RPM drive, so I decided to chew up some of the space with a dual boot. I got to late last night (about 6am) when I decided it was a dead proposition and I needed to revert to my XP SP2 desktop. Good news is that a majority of the software I loaded on Vista worked without a hitch. At the end of the day it came to that a few critical pieces of software weren't Vista-ready.
Vista Setup
Getting Vista installed was a snap and with the exception of the touchpad driver, everything worked flawlessly (and after installing the XP touchpad driver I was good to go).
Productivity Software
I installed Office XP to have Word and PowerPoint to do some work where Office 2007 might cause some compatibility issues. I then installed Office 2007 over it and it worked well side-by-side. I've been told that Outlook 2007 and Outlook XP won't work side-by-side so I didn't even try.
Outlook 2007 was a big problem. While it worked as advertised (and my SpamBayes Add-in worked well), I couldn't search at all my messages. Outlook 2007 seemed to want to use the Vista built-in search which wasn't working with Outlook, and brute force searching was simply broken. The rest of Office 2007 seemed to work fine though I live in Outlook.
I tried installing Small Business Accounting and it depended on .NET Framework 1.1 which wasn't installed curiously. I installed the .NET Framework 1.1 with SP1, but Vista complained the whole way and in the end it still didn't work.
Development Software
I got Visual Studio 2005 installed without a hitch. I did have to install IIS (as its not installed by default) before installing 2005, but it worked well.
I installed SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, having to tell Vista to install it even though it told me it didn't work right on Vista. I had to be sure. After installation, SQL 2000 worked fine. SQL 2005 on the other hand is completely broken under Vista. The server works, but none of the tools work at all.
Conclusion
I had decided to live with most of the problems of Vista but the SQL 2005 tools not working became the death-knell of my ability to go Vista now. Beta 2 is looking very good, its just not quite ready yet. Too bad, I was really hoping to go that direction.
On a side note, the user protection stuff that was constantly asking permission to do simple things (e.g. deleting a file from the desktop) was frustrating and I ended up turning it off and being a bad boy and running as full-admin all the time.
My only other comment on Vista was that explorer.exe was constantly crashing and losing my optical drives. It came up fast, but was part of my frustration.
