Vista advice needed

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Guest

I need to invest in a new laptop and a large majority of the ones (especially
the DELL XPS) are now running Vista.

I've had vista running on my PC at home for a while now and certain things
just doesn't really work well, such as VS.NET 2005. Mobile development
doesn't seem to work the same as on XP either.

How have you guys found the migration went from XP to Vista? Should i just
stick with what i know best, XP ?

Any advice greatly appreciated
 
Rob said:
I need to invest in a new laptop and a large majority of the ones (especially
the DELL XPS) are now running Vista.

I've had vista running on my PC at home for a while now and certain things
just doesn't really work well, such as VS.NET 2005. Mobile development
doesn't seem to work the same as on XP either.

How have you guys found the migration went from XP to Vista? Should i just
stick with what i know best, XP ?
Click to expand...
VS 2005 works with Vista. You will need Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack
1 Update for Windows Vista, which you can find here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929470/en-us
Microsoft advises you to run Visual Studio with administrative rights.
Finally you will need Windows Mobile Device Center which replaces
ActiveSync:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devicecenter.mspx
and an appropritate SDK like this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...66-3f61-4ddc-9510-ae450e2318c3&displaylang=en

Marc
 
Be careful. I've been running Vista for almost a year now, but still
have to boot to XP to do CE Development. The reason? My CE hardware
vendor doesn't yet have a driver that will allow seamless integration
with Visual Studio 2005 on Vista.
 
I've been using vista for a while and use it day to day to develop WM5
and above apps. VS2005 works fine, once running with the patch for
vista.

I have found that also installing evc and the old platform manager
allows a number of other tools to work which won't with just a VS2005
and WM5 sdks. (E.g. code snitch and proc man from entrek, I had
problems connecting to my device until i had installed platform
manager)

I can't run evc4 though so can't build for any platform below ppc2003.

Matt
 
If possible get it with no OS, otherwise when you get it the first thing to
do is format the drive and roll back to XP Pro. Vista just is not good for
developers - I know of way too many people that tried it and ended up
rolling back after much frustration. Save yourself the headache and time of
reinstalling everything and avoid Vista.
 
I agree 100% with Chris. I reformatted my hard drive on my new computer and
installed XP Pro.

Rick D.
Contractor
 
Whereas I've used Vista ever since it came out and had only one serious
compatibility issue (bad shell extension included in some old free hex
editor which crashed explorer a number of times a day, but Vista
gracefully recovered each time). After removing the app, no problems at
all.

I do embedded C development (okay, in a Linux VM on Vista), and desktop
and Windows Mobile app development in Visual Studio 2005. No issues
what so ever with what I do - even though I was expecting to have a
number of them.

Oh yes, I also had issues with an old set-top box SDK designed for NT4
which barely worked on XP and now, fails to read the unique ID for the
machine consistently (changes each reboot so cannot activate the
license). But I have my old machine for the very infrequent (1 - 2
times a year?) times I do that.

To put it simply, on a day to day basis, my ability to do my job in
Vista is exactly the same as it used to be in XP.

D
 
Then I count you as lucky. I have currently supported development tools
(like Platform Builder 5.0) from Microsoft that won't even run on the damned
thing and there are no plans to ever make it work. Evidently when a new
product comes out, all projects and engineers from the previous version are
expected to be shot. Nevermind the fact that Microsoft has promised a
10-year life cycle for the tool and the OS, and therefore the OEMs promise
the same to their customers.

The fact that Studio itself wouldn't run until they released a patch was a
clear indicator from the start that the developer was a second thought with
Vista. Maybe by SP4 it will be better and I'll try again, but for now Vista
is relegated to running only on a VM almost everywhere within our company,
and is used only for late cycle testing when we know everything works on XP
first or when someone specifically has a Vista question or issue.


--

Chris Tacke, eMVP
Join the Embedded Developer Community
http://community.opennetcf.com
 
You mean you *have* Vista running in your area?! ;-) I have completely
avoided it. I have enough problems with Platform Manager, Windows CE
4.2/5.0/6.0, various SDKs, etc. without adding an OS that won't sync with my
Windows Mobile device (or at least not even as well as ActiveSync 4.x does),
to the mix!

Paul T.
 
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