Frederick Chapleau weBlog on IT.

After a bit more than a week with Vista, here are my impressions:

1. Nice Design: Yes, it's a nice design, and the transision between design mode is not breaking (like the morph to gray in XP). But it is very important, that is my question.
2. Compatibility: No, it's not enough compatible with softwares like XP was compatible with softwares on 2000. Many software are not Vista Compatible.
3. Too Secure: Do I want from Vista that they ask the administrator (me) if an administrator (me) want to do administrative tasks on the (my) computer when I (me) am an administrator of the domain?!
4. Software Isolation: That's a great thing. Every thing that is installed by an installer in isolated from the rest. It takes a lot of disk, but when it's uninstalled no trace is still on the disk.
5. New Start Menu: Not sure of the new start menu behavior. Yes, sure, the screen it not filled up with the 5 levels of menus to reach the Remote Desktop Connection in Accessories... maybe I'm just a little... old (!)
6. Windows Explorer: Some +, some -. No horizontal scrolling. They saw the light, auto scrolling depending of the visible area! But, many custom views... I know that the space on my External Harddrive is low... Vista doesn't have to show it to me in red...
7. Gadgets: Those are realy... gadgets. Not realy usefull, takes a lot of place, and sometime, you will just remove them and replace them by something more usefull.

More to come! ;)

-f.

Looking at the different options in the control panel I saw the new Windows Experience Index.

This seams to be a tentative to produce a rating of the computer, so that the end-user can buy/install only software that they will be able to run.

I tried to know more on that by clicking on the "Learn more about the scores online". That redirected me to the Windows Website with the parameters "CPU=4.7&MEM=5.4&HDD=5.3&DWM=2.1&D3D=3.2" that are the different indexes gathered on my computer.

Hope they will fix that, I am interessed about the way they quote the indexes.

-f.

Yes, Windows Vista is now installed on my PC. Even if I heard that the OS is hard on memory, I installed it. The Launch here in Montreal convinced me to to the upgrade, and Install Office 2007 too.

I will post a series of article on my impression on the the new days with Windows Vista, Office 2007 and in a near future Exchange 2007.

I also see the new (for me) Groove 2007, maybe I will be able to give some feedback on this product too.

Let's begin with the installation. I launch the installation process ont a friday after noon. The first thing that I have done is to uninstall Nero Burning ROM and Daemon Tools that was stopping the installation due to know incompatibility (a small Software like Daemon Tools, ok, but Nero!)

I started the installation... after 1h I saw that the process is very, very long (why, at this moment I couldn't say). So I let it process, until I come back later and everything was stopped... a short investigation told me that the problem was my UPS! If it's because the process was demanding to much juice on the UPS or, because the discovery process just found the UPS and sent a command that stopped it, I don't know. But I disconnected the USB cable on it, and restarted the computer.

The first good point on the Vista Upgrade: I restarted the computer, and Vista done a complete roll back to Windows XP! but... without any problems, the whole system reverted like it was.

I restarted the process without the Usb cable to the UPS pluged in and everything was ok. About 3 to 5 hours after, Vista was installed.

The first thing that I done was ... Windows TAB... even If I didn't know that this was the shortcut key to the new task switcher, I tried and it worked ;)

The second thing was to check the memory. After the upgrade Vista taked about 200 to 250meg more of memory. That fair enough.

I worked a little on the computer that weekend, and found that Vista was more responsive(yes, more ?!) than Windows XP. The start key, the Windows-E key to start the explorer, the Task Switcher, even the given shortcut key (like mine, Ctrl-Alt-E to start Internet Explorer) was more efficient that the previous Windows XP handling of the same thing.

More to come...

-f.

Building a small project in .NET 1.1, I saw that the ODBC.Net driver did not returned the schema of the datasource. Because of that I migrated the project to .NET 2.0.

After doing a lot of stuff, I had the error "DragDrop registration did not succeed." when I enabled AllowDrop attribute on a control. Googling didn't return any answer, even in Google Groups, so I search the managed groups from Microsoft.

The answer finnaly appeared. Delete everything in your bin directory. It was saying.

I guess that the migration leaved some bin that was used, even if I recompiled in .NET 2.0.

-f.