Microsoft has just saved thousands of development companies lots of money. For the wrong reason. In his latest post, MS Corporate VP S. Somasegar announces the first beta release of service pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 - which is nice - and the extent of MS support for Visual Studio in Vista. And here’s the kicker.
MS will support Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and Visual Basic 6.0 ONLY on Vista. So then, unless you’re already developing .NET 3.0 apps for Vista, what the hell is the point of switching to Vista? Aside from it looks nicer than XP. I need to run VS2003 to support already written apps regardless of the fact I have VS2005. And even if I did have the time to upgrade them all to VS2005 projects, Somasegar also points out that there will be compatibility issues with VS2005 SP1 anyway. So why release it now? We’re developers - we know how to patch our own machines. Can’t SP1 wait until it will cure compatibility too? Grrr.

I note with some lust \ annoyance the new lab tests for Business Ultraportable laptops elsewhere on ITPro. It seems to be common knowledge that there are laptops for home users, office users, business users, silver surfers, the weak, the gamer and the third world. So why does the developer never get a laptop or indeed a desktop machine aimed specifically at them? We’re the people that write the software all these other users use. So play fair. Here are my specs. Where’s my cake to eat?

• 2GB+ for running multiple virtual PCs
• gigabit LAN \ 802.11n wireless for connectivity
• Quiet
• As much screenspace as possible for code : That means dual if not triple screen (with DVI) ability off the bat.
• Excluding games programmers, a good enough graphics card to not slow down running a couple of dozen 2D windows running under Aero \ Glass. For games programming, slots for the latest NVidia \ ATI cards and the ability to switch between them in hardware profiles without WIndows choking on the idea + the latest graphics cards.
• I have a stereo, I don’t need a soundcard. Unless I’m a games programmer.
• A CPU that’s future proof enough for at least a couple of years. Perhaps a couple to run VPCs on individual cores.
• A Hard Drive setup that’s fast and reliable enough to survive the many installs, builds, deployments, repartionings, defraggings, virus checks etc that it will be subjected to. Significantly more perhaps than any other user will give it.
• Cheap enough for a company to buy several of if they like what they see.

I built my last machine to get the specs that seemed right to me three years ago. Now there aren’t even the drivers to run Vista on it. Custom PC? PC Pro? Computer Shopper? Your suggestions please?

Well it’s taken a while but it looks like WinFX \ .NET 3.0 is on course to make the Vista package deadline as Microsoft said it would with its first release candidate being made available to download over the weekend. Just to remind you, .NET 3.0 is actually a collection of add-on libraries for .NET 2.0 dealign with UI, comms, business workflow and a few other things beside. The .NET 3.0 home page hasn’t been updated yet but the site does give a good overview of what there is to play with if you do choose to download it. Enjoy.