Goodbye Dual Boot
Since the RTM of Vista I have had my development tablet dual booting with XP Pro SP2. Toshiba recently delivered all the final drivers and software that I was missing for Vista to make things function like the function keys, automatic screen rotation, hard drive protection and optical drive acoustic silencer among others. With that, and the fact that I found how to get the Connect software for the Sony Portable Reader System to work on Vista I was now set to no longer need to boot into XP. I had not booted into Windows XP for a few weeks thus I decided it was time.
BAM! Goodbye dual boot. No more Windows XP on my primary development machine.
It felt good. People keep asking how I like Vista. I love it. I still have one open issue related to additional virtual networks with Virtual Server 2005 SP1 Beta but other than that everything now just works.
I read a lot of sour comments on Vista and some are well deserved. I have concerns on the DRM, VCP and other such controls that I feel are a bit draconian and are not only user unfriendly but not in a very good spirit.
I'm concerned about my grandma using Vista. For us techies we understand all these prompts from UAC and also tend to run software and environments that require elevated privileges, especially since they were not designed with UAC in mind, but if my grandma (I don't mean this as a parable style grandma- my grandma is quiet pc savvy) buys a new Dell this spring and comes with Vista I'm not sure that it's such a good idea yet and may revert her back to XP Home. Time will tell- for me I love it and think every developer should definately be trying to work primarily under Vista in order to begin to learn how to develop your software so that my Grandma (or your corporate end user) can run it on Vista without issue and a tech support contract from their grandson. ;-)
It's a new world even for the developers. There are more things to consider- things we should have always been considering but likely have not and your best indicator is when you run you get the 'dark screen of safety' and a UAC prompt. Hmmm... do I really need to do the operation that causes this and is this how it needs to be done? Can I delegate this higher authority action off to something else that already has privilieges... say via WCF? *WARNING* this last statement is entirely uninformed and may well be wrong but just popped into my head. But it seems a pattern may be elevated privilege needs are handled by activities not related to the active running pid but through secure messaging to a process that is running in an elevated mode already. I have to do a bit more research and study on best practices in developing software under UAC. In fact, I'll report my findings at VS Live San Fran in a session about Distributed Workflow Development and Deployment in Vista with special consideration of UACs effect on how to develop, deploy and run.
More later---
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