Well after a bit of extra effort, I managed to get my "cutting edge" laptop configured as follows:

  • x64 Vista Build 5270
  • x64 SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
  • Office 12 Beta 1
  • Visual Studio 2005 Professional
  • Added the Vista WinFx 3.0 Windows Feature
  • WinFx SDK
  • Visual Studio Extensions (a.k.a. Cider)
  • Workflow Foundation Beta
  • Expression Interactive Designer
  • Expression Graphic Designer

I did encounter a couple bumps along the way, which I managed to resolve myself - they were:

  • x64 Vista Build 5270 seems to be a lot happier on my C-drive than it did on my D-drive
  • On a wide screen display, 1024x768 is not a very attractive resolution - Vista dutifully stretched my desktop to fill the screen, but things looked a little strange - bumping up to 1650x1050 improved things tremendously
  • Visual Studio 2005 Professional's installer had trouble copying setup files from the DVD I burned from the MSDN ISO image I downloaded.  I fixed that by copying the DVD to the hard drive and then removing the "read only" flag from all the files
  • Expression Interactive Designer's installer issued a complaint, but appears to be installed and working just fine (i.e., I can get the Fabrikam demos going)

I'm actually surprised that those were the only issues I encountered, considering how betaish most of the above is.  Now if I can just get a wireless driver, I'll be all set.

It looks like we'll have a new CTP build of x64 Vista coming soon, and I'm inclinded to attempt an upgrade (and will do so with every CTP until RTM), and now that my MSCRM 3.0 VPC is almost together, I can get back to building my simple app on all this...