For those who are interested!

[Stephany Young]

For those who are interseted and especially for Tom Leylan and RobinS who
both asked.

My experience of Vista thus far has been nothing less than favourable.

We have just completed an exercise to roll Vista Business out to about 500
desktops including laptops.

Hardware wise we needed to upgrade the video cards on the 3 oldest machines
to make them Aero-capable.

One of our programs needs to be run 'As Administrator'. We were aware of
this one so it wasn't a surprise.

Two of our programs need to be run in 'compatibility mode'. We're not sure
as yet why but I have one of my staff working on this issue.

Apart from that it was painless, but I put that down to planning work that
my staff put in to the exercise.

I had had one issue on my own machine and that occured earlier today.

I created a new Windows Application project and dropped a DataGridView on
the form. Devenv prompty spat it's dummy with an 'AppCrash'. Repeated
attempts at the same thing had the same result. I created the project with
the DataGridView on an XP machine and then opened it in my machine and,
whatever the condition that was causing the problem was, it has disappeared,
so I'm not terribly concerned about it at this stage.

I love the Aero interface. Although it's not quite in the 'sliced bread'
area, already I am starting to wonder how we ever managed without it. A few
things that are in a different place or are accessed differently took a
little getting used to but that was no different with XP.

After hearing and reading all the ill-informed claptrap that had been
peddled about how Vist was evil and would mean the end of civilisation as we
know it, one has to wonder what all the fuss was about.

For RobinS, yes a Service Pack has been announced for the 3rd quarter, but,
at this stage, it's not a 'fix' pack. Rather it will released in conjunction
with 'Longhorn' and will beef Vista to cater for the 'Longhorn' stuff that
has yet to be released.

Out of all the people I personally know that have installed/upgraded to
Vista, none have had a 'bad' experience with it apart from minor 'hardware
not up to spec' issues.

One area where I am disappointed is the number of 'big player' software
companies whose products were not Vista ready on time. Certainly some were
on the ball but the number who weren't has to be of concern. With all the
time and the 'spoon-feeding' that they have had I think they could have done
better.

 

[Bruce W. Darby]

Thanks for the information Stephany. I won't be able to purchase until after
mid-year, but it's good to hear that life isn't as damaged as some have been
claiming.

Bruce

 

[Cor Ligthert [MVP]]

Stephany,

What language version?
To make it complete. Maybe that is for you obvious but it is certainly not
that everybody knows where you live and then what language there is spoken.

Cor

 

[Tom Leylan]

Excellent news, thanks Stephany. I have to say I thought most of the dire
warnings were nonsense.

Speaking of Aero. I'm looking forward to transparent windows adding an
extra dimension to the UI. Transparency gives an "importance" aspect which
is hard to convey any other way.

 

[RobinS]

Stephany,

Thanks for the information. I was fortunate enough to able to attend the
Vista Launch in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, and the demos were
certainly attractive. The Aero interface looks really cool, and I'm looking
forward to using it. I don't think it will work on my 2-year-old laptop,
although I now own a (free) copy of Vista Ultimate (and Office 2007) that
they gave out at the event. Woo-hoo!

I agree about the big vendors who aren't ready. The first one I heard about
was Intuit. The first article about them talked about how terrible it was
for Microsoft to release Vista when the software companies like Intuit
weren't ready, and I was thinking, didn't Microsoft give people like 2
years' notice or something like that?

Then a followup article told "the real story". Intuit never spent the money
to upgrade their products to be "WindowsXP certified" because they didn't
want to spend the money. Apparently had they done that, they would have
worked under Vista. So now they have to do twice as much work to move
forward. I was impressed with what the article said about how much help
Microsoft was providing to any software vendor who asked for it.

The other one I was surprised and disappointed about was Apple's iTunes.
Hello?!?! They've sold over 50 million iPods, mostly to Windows users, and
their product won't work under Vista? Guess they were busy working on that
iPhone. (And don't flame me; I have an iPod, I went to MacWorld, and I'm
generally an apple fan, which just made it more disappointing.)

Have you upgraded to Office 2007 yet? Do you like it? Anyone else? Has
anyone used Access 2007, is it a lot different? One of my friends is an
Access programmer and she is concerned about getting too far out of the
skill while she's working in another direction this year.

Thanks,
Robin S.
Ts'i mahnu uterna ot twan ot geifur hingts uto.
-----------------------------------------------

 

[ShaneO]

We have just completed an exercise to roll Vista Business out to about
500 desktops including laptops.

I'm interested - Were these all with the same organisation or was this
number spread over many different organisations/companies/government
departments?

One of our programs needs to be run 'As Administrator'. We were aware of
this one so it wasn't a surprise.

Two of our programs need to be run in 'compatibility mode'. We're not
sure as yet why but I have one of my staff working on this issue.

How were your applications deployed? Were there any particular
deployment issues that you found with Vista, say in comparison to XP?

ShaneO

There are 10 kinds of people - Those who understand Binary and those who
don't.

 

[Stephany Young]

Single company - multiple sites.

And yes Shane we do have some companies with that number of desktops over
this side of the ditch

No deployment issues whatsoever. As I said, I believe that that was down to
the preparatory wok that my staff did - All the wrinkles were ironed out
before we even thought about rolling it out.

 

[ShaneO]

Single company - multiple sites.

And yes Shane we do have some companies with that number of desktops
over this side of the ditch

You guys really have gone ahead in the past couple of years since you've
installed electricity!!

The cause of my interest is that none of the larger organisations here
in Australia appear to want to go anywhere near Vista. Not because it's
Vista necessarily, but I can't think of any company with more than a
couple of hundred computers that ever jumped-in on a new O/S.

ShaneO

There are 10 kinds of people - Those who understand Binary and those who
don't.

 

[Stephany Young]

Yeah ... that 'leccy is just great. And we learned to play cricket
too!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[verinews]

I think that most of the complaining is from the end-user point of view, not
the software vendor side. Rolling out 500 Vista installs in a company where
you probably lock down the users permissions anyway doesn't really apply.
Vista is made for businesses who WANT to lock down their machines.

I haven't even touched Vista, but from what I've read setting up a PC (as in
~personal~ computer) with Vista kindof takes away the ~personal~ part. In
the default install, any remnants of individual control are gone. That's
what the majority of complaints are...

 

[Stephany Young]

I don't recall saying that we locked down the users permissions. Don't make
assumptions!

In fact the users permissions are very liberal.

Remember that PC stands for 'Personal Computer' and not 'Personalised
Computer'. If you want to personsalise it then Vista allows you to do so to
your hearts content.

 

[verinews]

Don't make assumptions? Have you interviewed all 500 employees to see if
they enjoy the "Vista experience"? They are the ones using the PC's, not
you. As a developer your sole responsibility is to make sure your software
runs on the new OS. If it does, then ~your~ experience is favorable --
don't assume to speak for the 500 using the PC's.

Perhaps your experiences are favorable because your company does allow
"liberal" permissions. From what I've read, the views that express disdain
for Vista are almost exclusively dealing with the overbearing security and
the hoops that a user (and you, the developer), have to go through to
~override~ that security.

A better question to ask might be: How many people running Vista disable the
default security and allow "liberal" permissions so that the OS is actually
usable and enjoyable?

 

[Stephany Young]

Yes!!!!!! Personally!!!!!!!!!

Don't make assumptions? Have you interviewed all 500 employees to see if
they enjoy the "Vista experience"? They are the ones using the PC's, not
you. As a developer your sole responsibility is to make sure your
software runs on the new OS. If it does, then ~your~ experience is
favorable -- don't assume to speak for the 500 using the PC's.

Perhaps your experiences are favorable because your company does allow
"liberal" permissions. From what I've read, the views that express
disdain for Vista are almost exclusively dealing with the overbearing
security and the hoops that a user (and you, the developer), have to go
through to ~override~ that security.

A better question to ask might be: How many people running Vista disable
the default security and allow "liberal" permissions so that the OS is
actually usable and enjoyable?