Vista RTM - Experiences

[Administrator]

Well, I jumped right on the Vista RTM release which became available to MSDN'ers last Thursday evening. I was at a good time in my business to get going on Vista before venturing into our new development. This thread is our "war stories" thread to discuss our ventures in migrating to Vista.

To start, this is probably one of the most drastic changes to the Windows OS since Windows 95, if not even greater. I didn't track Vista during beta and RC stages, so this is my first hands on experience with Vista, other than screen shots on web sites and magazine articles. My first day with Vista was "oh my, this is really different" until I resorted to "memory and habit" patterns as to where things are.

I have a high-end Dell Precision Workstation 670 fully loaded and never really used the hardware to its fullest so I elected to go the 64-bit route. The first battle was getting my 670 to even boot from the DVD, then getting that resolved in about 5 hours, which resorted to setting my DVD from CS to Master and the other CD-ROM from CS to Slave. I then finally got Windows to boot, but only after loading the SCSI Raid drivers to see my hard drives did I hit the next road block. I can't remember the error, but I had to change the order of boot devices and disable my secondary CD-ROM to get by this show stopper. From there, I got the OS installed and began my first experiences with x64.

Although ActiveWin.com shows an article on how Vista comes with 19,500 drivers on the DVD, I have been spending most time with Google getting my "stuff" installed. Searching for x64 drivers for about everything from my Dymo label writer, nvidia video, no driver support for my Dell 2405FPW display, HP ScanJet 7400c not supported, but found a note to use vuescan drivers (not free), on and on! ActiveSync doesn't work, not sure if there are any anti-virus suites that support Vista, I'll have to check the Windows Live OneScan, and go there.

I attempted to load a Windows XP x64 raid driver (perc 320/dc) and next thing you know, Vista is dead. It mentioned rebooting then running a repair, never got beyond that so I decided it was time to go the 32-bit route. Well, I couldn't even get it to install, probably again a RAID driver issue, I kept getting the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and it would keep rebooting. So back to 64-bit again, here I am, just got Office System 2007 installed (although not yet launched to use) and I'm trudging on. The video often is "scrambled" in sections of the screen (multi-color bars) which I'm not sure if that's due to a beta nvidia video driver, or the Plug-n-Play driver being used for the 24" LCD.

I'll continue down the 64-bit path and see how things go, but I'm beginning to believe that 64-bit may be for servers only, very specific applications, performance, and not really meant to be for the "home" user, developer, i.e. non-server use. It just doesn't seem to have been adopted up till now, will it be from this point forward with Vista 64, even though there was XP 64, is yet to be seen.

Feel free to chime in with your Vista war stories, how you're doing in this migration, etc. I believe this is going to be one of the hardest OS upgrades for the world, at least based on my experiences and I consider myself to be "somewhat" competent with computers, as opposed to seeing my parents try to go through this! It also seems to be "we're caught with our pants down" at Vista RTM, just not much really ready for this release for some reason! I know there is time between now and the Jan 30 "public release" but vendors have a lot of work to do over this 2 month period to really get this OS supported.

Vista is needed for sure, it's "Windows MAC" as I call it! It's going to be exciting, but I think it's just the start of the "OS Effects" to come, we'll be even more MAC'd in the next Windows OS I believe.

Back to the fight...now to my development products.

 

[JuggaloBrotha]

i've used the vista beta a little while back, the most trippy thing about vista i noticed was when you minimize something (like firefox) it takes a screenshot of the entired window (loaded webpage and all) then it shrinks it and sucks it into the taskbar (it does a twist thing when pulling it down)

it threw me off balance at first

i'm sure once vista hits the public release, things like drivers for everything will be ready by then

 

[Raven65]

Just to throw in a note of support for Microsoft (shocking ) I setup Vista on my two dev PC's at home the other night. Both installed flawlessly and quickly from the DVD and both found all necessary drivers. Took 2 reboots to get them applied, 1 for updates, and I was off to the races.

Interesting that you had some many problems out of a more "known" machine Neal (being a factory box). I'm running 4 wide serial ATA raid on Seagate drives, ATI9800, legacy sound, dual NIC, and my media center equipment (Happauge 150 + MSoft's own remote).

I do continually get notices on launch that Studio 2005 is known to have compatability issues with Vista, and (regretably) I've already had to disable UAC is it was driving me insane....but, I did find that AVG runs on Vista, for me @ least...

 

[Administrator]

Raven65: You using x86 or x64?

I'm reading a lot on User Account Control (UAC) - now that I figured out what that was, and I'm going to disable it for a while as I get VS 2003/2005 installed. Seems like it's the source of installation issues, gonna be a fun ride the next couple of months!

 

[Raven65]

x86 for me, still running on P4's =\.

Yea, UAC is wonderfully nice ON PAPER, but, when nearly EVERY action on the computer requires a breif pause, a screen flicker to lock the OS while loading the 'sand box' dialog to ensure you want to do what you just did...

I simply do not understand (perhaps I'm missing something?) how any user could live w/ UAC turned on. In Beta 2 at least, I was getting 5-10 dialogs per hour of usage...dialogs that STOP the system mind you. You've no idea how annoying it is that your TV show or MP3 stops while you confirm that yes, indeed, you do want to delete the .TXT file your application just created so you can run the output again.

 

[Administrator]

Is it true VS 2003 cannot be installed on Vista?

 

[vis781]

"Visual Studio.net 2003 will work mostly on vista." What the hell that means i don't know. Vista will support a 1.1 runtime but it has been designed for use with .Net 3.0 (Formerly WinFx). The strange thing is that Vista provides full support for the VB6 IDE, weird or what? As far as this programmer can tell it's all about LinQ for the future of .Net programming and that has been totally integrated into Windows Vista, however it is supported on WinXp.

 

[Administrator]

Yeah, this morning I decided to just install VS 2003 and see what happens. I believe the issues are mainly with asp.net due to the IIS7 and no FrontPage extensions in Vista. I guess I'll have to bring my laptop up to speed to maintain support for my VS 2003 web apps, this has become one royal pain in the arse! I have no problem with Vista/2005 and going forward if it wasn't for maintaining existing apps that MUST be in .NET 1.1 and are asp.net!

Just like ActiveSync, which I am getting the vibes it's "built-in" to Vista, however, I have to find out why the RAPI communications aren't working now!

I sure miss my "perfect" XP configuration, but we devs have to keep moving forward and I didn't want to buy another computer as this Dell Workstation was very expensive and is very fast!

So far all is well with 64-bit, I have another day of installs. I have UAC turned off and I love the gazillion warnings about compatibility with dang near everything installed! "Hello, I'm Vista, I'm just not compatible!!!"

 

[Raven65]

Yea, it always seemed to me that Studio 2003 was almost the one release Microsoft wished it could take back. Even here w/ Vista we see that their supporting far older platforms (VB6) without making (apparently) even slight considerations for their 03 release.

Luckily for me, my development efforts went directly from VB6 to Studio 05, and I only have VS03 (on my XP install) for a few apps I have to support when others are away.

On a side not, I must say, I do love the "breadcrumb" style address bar!

 

[Administrator]

On a side not, I must say, I do love the "breadcrumb" style address bar!

Yeah, we may love a lot of these things we see, but WE WILL HAVE TO ALSO CREATE THEM! In other words, everything we see, it's more work for us now! Our customers are going to want this! Thanks Microsoft!

 

[JohnH]

Of course there are going to be some compatibility issues and late drivers, if not Vista would have been released long time ago, it takes a long time getting the whole computing industry in sync for a full new version operating system to be used by a strong majority throughout the world, it's not just the OS functionality that have to be ready, also just about everything that goes with it. I just read that Vista ships with 19500 drivers, plus adding 11700 more already available from Windows Update.. that's a whole lot of drivers being developed and approved this year for Vista only. Comparing XPs initial numbers were 10000+2000 five years ago.

 

[Administrator]

The fun continues...to continue my "documentary"...

I was at the point having installed VS 2003, VS 2005, and VS6 for my legacy apps that all was well and it's time to get my 3rd party ActiveX products installed to maintain my VB6 apps. This is where it just keeps on getting better! Although the Visual Studio's installed, some of the ActiveX products use an installer that just won't work on Vista! Regardless of x86/x64, it will not install! After a few of these, I gave up and ripped off (uninstalled) VS 2003 and VS6. My laptop will now become the secondary dev machine for maintaining the older apps as it's running WinXP.

I go to install ComponentArt Web.UI 2006.2 that just released today (for .NET 2.0) and it installs fine. However, you go to run a sample, and as they use Access (OleDb), guess what, Windows Vista x64 (or any x64 for that matter) doesn't have a Jet driver! So a little Googling found the resolution, although I hate to have to recompile everything, but here's the answer.

I truly see the performance gain in running x64, well, I really can't say I can compare it to anything as I haven't run Vista x86, but the computer in general is running much faster than with XP. I'm also running my 4 SCSI 320's (15K RPM) as a Stripe (Raid 0) instead of Raid 5 this time too, going all out for performance!

Installing Adobe CS2 last night was fun too, got some weird error about not retrieving the username, etc. Sure enough, it's on Google, uninstalled/reinstalled that!

Yep, it's just been a real treat, why I ever let go of my perfectly running XP Pro with a sweet developer configuration I don't know! I did call Dell to consider buying a new machine for Vista, but declined. I've had two dev machines for me before, it's a pain to keep up to date, I prefer to have one primary, and a laptop for on the road communications.

So now I'm running VS 2005 only, this is the "future box" for development. Now just waiting for drivers (nvidia Quadro FX 3400) and SoundBlaster Audigy 2 (mixer, etc.) to come through, then monitor (Dell 2405FPW) etc. Fun fun!

 

[Administrator]

Regarding the OleDb on x64, what I'm beginning to think now is "Web apps are dynamically compiled" so how would you set a target processor in this case? Hmmm...

 

[Administrator]

Well, now that everything is loaded, I'm back to working in VS 2005. Boy, it sure is dreary in there now, all the "gray's"! I sure liked the brown toolbar theme with slight 3D effect before. Anyone figured out how to get VS 2005 to look like VS 2005 again?