Plip's Weblog

Phil Winstanley - British .NET chap based in Lancashire. Enjoys tea and tech. Working for Microsoft.

Vista a month on - how does it help the web developer?

Well, it's been over a month since I installed Vista on my shiny new(ish) Compaq nx9420.

My machine proports to be Windows Vista Capable (via a rather fetching sticker as shown below) so I had decided as soon as vista hit the retail market I would install  it.

I am a typical developer so my application usage revolves around a few applications (time spent comes from my timesheet logging application), here are my top 10: -

  1. VS.NET 2005 (26%)
  2. Outlook (15%)
  3. Internet Explorer (12%)
  4. Remote Desktop (8%)
  5. Sperical Timesheet Logger (5%)
  6. Word (5%)
  7. Excel (3%)
  8. SQL Server Management Studio (3%)
  9. Visio (2%)
  10. Trillian (2%)

The other 19% of stuff is gaming, meetings, other applications or being on the phone.

I think this is probably pretty average, these number have been drawn up since January 17th and cover all days (weekdays and weekends) between then and now.

So let's look at some of the above applications and see how the operating system has helped me out or changed the way I do things.

VS.NET (26% Total)

Running VS.NET on Vista to me is no different to running it on Windows XP, things are exactly the same, I use the built in Web Server and not IIS locally so I don't benefit from that, if anything VS.NET on Vista is a little less stable for me, occasionally it just locks up, something it never did on Windows XP (I'm yet to install the VS.NET Patch for Vista RTM, that may change things).

So are there any benefits I see from being on Vista right now when using VS.NET? Nope, I'm afraid it offers me nothing.

Microsoft Office 2007 (25% Total)

Now, I'm absolutley 100% in love with Office 2007, I could never ever go back to previous versions of Office, I love the Ribbon and the PDF addin also rocks, but how is it different on Vista to the experience I'd get on Windows XP? There's no difference at all, Vista does not offer me anything extra or anything better when using Office. The only thing Vista does give me which is realted to this are the "preview icons" in the Vista shell and the Desktop search which is integrated into the operating system, but that's not a big win, I could live without the preview icons or the desktop search.

Internet Explorer 7 (12%) 

No brainer, nothing special in Vista which is any different to the XP implementation. Considering the browser is where I spend a whopping 12% of my time it's really telling that I could go to XP and have the exact same experience.

Conclusion

I can go back to XP today without any loss in experience or productivity. I cannot however give up Office 2007.

What's your experiance been like?

Posted: Mar 11 2007, 05:23 PM by Plip | with 6 comment(s)
Filed under: , , ,

Comments

ScottGu said:

Two things to quickly note:

1) Make sure you install the VS 2005 SP1 for Vista update that shipped last week: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=90e2942d-3ad1-4873-a2ee-4acc0aace5b6&displaylang=en

This fixes a number of issues that VS 2005 had with running on Vista.

2) Check out IIS 7.0.  It includes a number of cool features for ASP.NET development (even if you are deploying on IIS6).  I'll blog more about some of these over the next few weeks.

Thanks,

Scott

# March 11, 2007 2:39 PM

Oskar Austegard said:

Plip, ditto.  We moved to Vista hoping that the ReadyBoost feature would make the Sharepoint development experience a bit better (since it all pretty much has to be done in a vpc, we were hoping that we'd be able to dedicate a few more precious MB of RAM to the vpc.  While I have to admit that Vista+RB is beter at managing othe host apps started on the small amount of memory not dedicated to the vpc image, unfortunately Vista itself consumes enough additional memory to efectively cancel the RB feature's benefits.  As for VS on Vista I haven't even installed it yet...

# March 11, 2007 2:54 PM

Gabriel Lozano-Moran said:

I had to revert to Windows XP. I had too much performance issues with the designers in Visual Studio. My resolution is full hd and because of the way that Vista deals with window painting there are several known issues with the Class Designer, Dataset Designer and the Workflow Designer. When I run 3 virtual machines in Windows XP I can still work on the host, when I try the same on Vista with the same virtual machines Vista becomes unworkable. Maybe these are all driver related, nevertheless I do not have these problems on XP so going back was a logical step for me.

# March 12, 2007 5:19 AM

Mike Chaliy said:

Basically the same you can say about Win 2000 and Win XP.

For me vista gives much more usable look and feel, and I can not live without search boxes, expectialy in start menu and uninslall windows.

I will try Sperical Timesheet Logger, hope I will not spend 5% of my time using it :)

# March 12, 2007 11:59 AM

Shane said:

I bought a new PC on Saturday that is very capable of running Vista smoothly, but I didn't buy it.

I can't justify the purchase price - I just don't see the point in upgrading.

Am I really missing something, or is the Microsoft marketing machine losing some of its 'wow'?

# March 13, 2007 8:14 AM

John Walker said:

I agree with you for the most part, but I think the pluses will become more evident 6-12 months down the road.

For now, I enjoy the new UI, better backups, previous versions functionality (wonderful). I also think, even though I'm a dev and know about security, that the underlying security improvements are huge. That's one of those things that is almost imperceivable, but huge at the same time. Especially for "regular" users out there.

I think in the long run, we're going to see some amazing apps built on it and .NET 3.0 that will really be fantastic. We shall see.

PS: Install the VS SP for Vista. I think that will help.

# March 17, 2007 2:53 AM