Finally I had the chance to install Vista on my work PC - something I've wanted to do since November when it became available on MSDN. Now the installation is over and it went incredibly smooth. It installed all my hardware except my onboard audio controller. The installation took 30 minutes without any problems at all. After the first start of Vista it automatically downloaded an installed the driver for my audio controller. Excellent!

I didn't format my C drive before installing, but went for the easy solution. It's the first time I've ever done that on my own PC. The cool thing about it is that the Vista installation does not delete the folders on the C drive, but leaves them alone. Except the windows folder, that is renamed to windows.old so you still have access to all your documents etc. I'll take what I need and then delete it.

Then Office Ultimate 2007 was intalled in 15 minutes without any problems and the same with Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 needs Service Pack 1 and another small update to run on Vista, and right now the service pack is installing. I'm excited to see how the new IIS 7 works with our existing web applications and how Visual Studio debugs through it.

Source Safe is also a joker I think. Even on XP it was extremely unstable and at best annoying, but it worked.

So far, there has been no problems at all. I'll hope it continues.

Update: some hours later

It took some hours to install SQL Server 2005 and download Service Pack 2 that you need to run it on Vista. Source Safe intallation was fast and error less and it hooked right into Visual Studio 2005 as expected. When it came to running our web application Headlight on the local IIS 7 the trouble started. ASP.NET is not installed by default and after I installed it, the mappings where wrong. Luckily there were help to get right here and in no time, everything worked great.

All in all it took me 6 hours to install the following, including the download time for the service packs:

• Windows Vista Business x64 Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 + SP1 + SP1 update
• SQL Server 2005 Management Studio x64 + SP2
• Office Ultimate 2007
• Visual Source Safe 2005
• Getting my web applications running on IIS 7

After playing around with Vista I feel it was a very good idea to taking the time to install it. It looks and feels great.

Finally Internet Explorer caught up with the rest of the browsers and introduced tabs. For some reason I don’t know, the tabs feature doesn’t work the way you would expect from your experience with Firefox, Opera etc.

All the other browsers with tabs open a new tab when you click a link like this with the target set to _blank:

<a href="example.com" target="_blank">example</a>

This is expected behaviour, but IE7 doesn’t open a new tab, it opens a brand new window just like IE6 instead. This is the default behaviour of IE7 and it might be this way because of backwards compatibility with slow IE6 users. Luckily, there is a way to change the behaviour.

Go to Tools - > Internet Options.

Press the Settings… button in the tab section.

Select the Let Internet Explorer decide how pop-ups should open radio button and click OK.