I might as well put in my two cents on saving Windows XP from extinction. I’ve tinkered around with Vista a little bit and the interface is pretty cool as long as you have the hardware to run it. Overall it looks good and does have more, albeit annoying, security features. Minor gripes would include changing items in the control panel that have been the same for years.
My major gripe would be directly related to work and I’m sure other developers have already voiced this as well. The gripe would be that there is no formal support for Visual Studio 2003 on Vista. Like many other developers I have to maintain many applications that are a little bit older and were built in 2003 using the 1.1 framework. Microsoft has their spin on compatibility issues with Visual Studio and Vista here. I especially like the seventh and eight Q&As. I wouldn’t be as annoyed by the whole thing if it weren’t for the next to last Q&A “We are committed to helping developers move their .NET Framework 1.1 code to the .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0”. That’s great but in the real world outside of Redmond I can’t just put my other projects on hold to upgrade the old apps.
I asked a Microsoft sales rep about the situation last autumn. The answer I got was to use Microsoft’s version of VMware (Virtual PC) to run XP and use VS2003 on that. I’ve used VMware in the past on servers and it is really neat but I only have so much CPU and RAM on my computer that running a virtual XP PC would bog down my system even more.
I suppose I could try and dig up an older PC to run VS2003, but I couldn’t guarantee that I would be lucky enough to uncover one. I think I’ll just sign the Save XP petition and hope for the best.