After about 3 weeks of using Vista RTM as my primary windows development environment, I’m officially downgrading to XP.
The reasons for this are many:
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Driver issues; Mouse, firewire controller, power management, to name a few.
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Nothing works without about 10 extra installation steps. VMWare Workstation and Visual Studio are the two key components of my development environment. Visual Studio needs a custom patch, needs to be run as administrator, yet still doesn’t fully work right with some plugins I rely on. VMWare Workstation doesn’t run or install correctly without modifying Vista security settings. I’d love to run the 6.0 beta [which has amazing Visual Studio integration] on Vista – but Visual Studio wouldn’t start because it could not “acces the log file”. That’s awesome.
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Vista has been out in beta in one form or another for quite a long time now, but the level of changes made during the final 6 months created all sorts of issues that are similar to this. SftpDrive has had Vista support throughout this process, only to have various aspects of it broken and require various fixes for release. The latest 1.6 beta now works with RTM.
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UAC is really annoying. The first thing you need to do is turn it off. You would hope some basic sanity would have resolved a few of the issues, such as using control panel. You can’t do anything in the control panels without re-authorizing priveledges on practically every click.
- Everything covered in here: The 5 sins of Vista. #1 and #5 really bother me. #1 is truly asinine.
Overall – I’m left trying to figure out why Vista is better and why it took 5 years to make it happen. The start menu is new, I guess. The windows have translucent borders if you spent over $1500 on your machine. Give me a break.
The lesson I’m taking away is that developers can only sell upgrades and “new” revisions based on features. It’s truly poor form to roll 5 years of bug fixes into a $350 package with more regressions than new features.
I’m going back to XP.
[Magnetk Blog]