So Longhorn gets its first public beta. Time to see what can be seen.

I ran it in Virtual PC first to great and get a grasp on it, but without any dedicated VM Additions, it ran so slow I couldn’t get anything done with it. So I cobbled together a physical test rig and came across my first problem. Longhorn’s activation process is much pickier than those of previous OS’s. Using the same DVD as I installed on the VPC, Longhorn mark 2 wouldn’t activate. Further investigation revealed it was because I had already activated it on the VPC. And as I couldn’t unactivate the VPC, I had to get a new Longhorn disc. Mad installers beware!!

Second thing to note is that wireless networking isn’t installed by default in Longhorn b3 - so it’s wired connections only until you’ve managed to activate it over the internet and get wireless running. If Longhorn doesn’t have the driver for your particular wireless card, try a Vista driver. It had no problem with my installing the Vista driver for my card, so try and start there. One other point to note here was that while it was connected by wire to my hub, nothing could connect wirelessly. Might not have been to do with Longhorn but just in case…

Last but not least is the fact that while it’s not too difficult to find your way around the Longhorn control panels, configuration screens and admin tools, you’re going to need some help to find everything, much like you do after making the switch from XP to Vista. Microsoft says that the best way to work with Longhorn is with Vista clients and the help certainly seems to bear that out, referring to itself as Vista at least in the places I looked and assuming you were running Vista in others. Let’s hope the copy and pasting between OS’s is identified and eradicated when they run through all the docs to change its name to Windows Server 2008.

From a dev’s perspective, let’s also hope they ship a new public build that coincides with the next beta of .NET 3.5. I mean, Server will ship with .NET 3.5 \ Silverlight as features to install - the question is when will one be bundled with the other and be unofficially be renamed .NET 2008?