I haven't posted in a couple of days. I've had to set up a Vista test and development platform. One of our customers is investigating rolling out Vista soon. We've have to take a hard look at one of our flagship software releases to get it in shape for Vista.

Our customer mandates a locked down environment for Windows XP and no doubt will maintain this policy for Vista. I agree with the purpose of this policy and I generally try to emulate the environment as closely as possible in my development work. This means not turning off UAC, not disabling protected mode for IE and not relaxing file and registry permissions. I also like to develop as a standard user on XP, althought VS 2005 won't let me do this on Vista.

Over the last several days I've installed Visual Studio 2005, Visual Source Safe 2005 and a few development tools I rely upon on Windows Vista Business Edition connected to an Active Directory domain controlled by Windows Server 2003.

Initial Observations:

1. My once adequate development box is now highly underpowered and abysmally slow. Compiles on VS 2005 take nearly three times longer.
2. My once adequate video card has a Vista performance index of 2.2 out of 5 and I dare not cannot run the cool new video stuff on it.
3. My Smart Card SCR331 reader had to have its firmware upgraded to support the latest driver.
4. Visual Studio 2005 must be patched for Vista.
5. Visual Studio 2005 must be run with elevated permissions if I expect to set breakpoints on my COM+ components.
6. UAC is simply a pain in the butt. There is no polite way to say it. When I am developing, I need to copy new versions of components to the Program Files directory and UAC is there to make sure I enjoy that experience to the fullest.
7. Internet Explorer's Protected Mode makes a lot of sense. Unless you have an ActiveX control that runs locally as a file processor. Then your well crafted component is basically junk and everyone in the office looks at you like you just wasted two years of their lives. (Fortunately, COM+ will come to the rescue on this one.)
   
8. For some reason, my setup program does not install COM+ components correctly. I can register the components manually and the server operates as expected.
9. There's a new "N" attribute on files. DlgDirList will not operate correctly if the"N" attribute is set. For instance, if I copy some binary files to a special processing directory, and then have DlgDirList look for read only files (or read-write files for that matter), the function will not return any files that have an "N" attribute. DlgDirList hasn't been updated to understand the new attribute and simply ignores the file. This may be a joy to explain to inquiring minds.

That's about it for my first observations. It's not real ugly, but it's not realy pretty either. The last item really concerns me. It's not a major problem for me, but the software operator my not like using the DOS attrib command to turn off the "N" attribute.