The focus for me this week has been dog fooding Vista, Office, Orcas and half the other products running on my machine. There may have been some time back in the Linux days when I had this many beta bits on my box, but I doubt it.

I’ve had Vista running on some machine, off and on, for several months, but there was still something holding me back from full time use. A couple of weeks ago my buddy Steve Teixeira finally convinced me it was time to get serious about the world’s biggest beta. I first formatted my best desktop’s drives, and then did a clean install of Vista. After the machine booted into the OS, I instinctively ducked, expecting something terrible to happen. Yet low and behold, it worked well enough for me to stay productive!

You’ve heard the stories, I’m sure, so I won’t go into details. Yet the only serious problem I’ve had was with Outlook. Several times my PST file became corrupted, and I had to run ScanPst to repair it. I then began serious testing of the RSS feeds in Outlook 2007, and that appears to have caused all kinds of troubles. So I’ve backed the feeds down to a few dozen essentials, and I’ve treated Outlook a bit more gingerly than usual, and everything is running fine.

I now have Vista running on my main desktop and on my laptop. The laptop sports a T2600 CPU running at 2.16GHz. I also have a 100 GB hard drive running at 7200 RPM, 2 GB of RAM, and an X1400 graphics card. This gives me a Windows Experience Index (WEI) of a lukewarm 3.6. The processor gets a 4.8 rating, the RAM 4.9, the hard disk 4.9, and the graphics card holds me back with its score of 3.6.

Nevertheless, I haven’t had any serious performance problems to date, though I assume that sooner or later the graphics card is going to catch up with me. I once installed Age of Empires III on this laptop, and the poor thing broke out in a sweat and started begging for mercy. Vista consumes plenty of clock cycles, but it’s not a complete pig. At any rate, it’s much more understanding of clock-cycle-challenged hardware than is Age of Empires III.

Downloads

You will have to forgive me if all my references this week are to beta software. If you are a developer, you should probably be running a lot of beta bits right now. Jim Allchin even has an open letter to developers explaining why these fresh bits are so steaming hot. The bottom line is that every few years new platforms appear, and that means there are many new business opportunities, and many chances to innovate. These are the fun times in this business, so you need to get these burnished bits on your system and start playing with them.

• If you are not part of the Vista beta, the RC1 version of the new OS is available for download to anyone with an MSDN subscription. The team is quite anxious that you test this code, so asking for a copy is likely to yield results.
• If you want to be up to date in the Windows programming world, you need the .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime and Windows SDK.
• I can’t say that Visual Studio 2005 runs flawlessly on Vista, but I’m apparently too fat fingered to find the bugs that others occasionally mention. In other words, it works fine for me. If you want to walk on the wild side, please download the beta of Visual Studio SP1.
• You can also get the Orcas preview, which is the next version of Visual Studio. I know that Virtual Servers are very au courant, but I just can’t get worked up about them. So I’ll put out a warning: these fresh bits are housed in Virtual PC image.
• If you don’t have it already, you should get the May LINQ CTP. As you probably know, LINQ is the hottest new feature in Orcas. I have a little post on important LINQ links.
• If you are still on XP, and you are not already suffering along with the rest of us on the IE 7 beta, then you need to download it now before they fix all the bugs and the fun is over. Actually, most of the troubles I’ve had are due to incompatible add-ons. After you install, if you crashing frequently, click the little Tools icon on the right, and choose “Manage Add-ons” from the menu. On Vista, IE7 gets flustered if I don’t prefix “http://” before my addresses. That’s strange behavior, if I do say so myself.
• After you have IE7 installed, then you have to go over to http://www.live.com and start playing with all the toys that they have put together. There are many possibilities, but I’m partial to the Live Writer blogging software and its plug-ins. Or maybe you would want to try a Gadget.

The bottom line is that everything is in beta this fall. If you are a serious Windows developer who’s running only shipping products, then you are probably doing something wrong.