Ok. Windows Vista has officially incurred my wrath. I spend several hours a day writing .NET code. Usually, I work with Visual Studio 2003. I have a few projects that require Visual Studio 2005. You could understand my surprise when I found out that VS 2003 was not supported on Vista. I was even more surprised to learn that VS 2005 only kind of worked. For some reason the development tools do not play nice with the new flagship operating system. I do find it ironic that their ancient Visual Basic 6 development environment is still fully supported. That is like if my ‘05 Chevy is out of warranty. But the transmission on my ‘86 Buick La Saber was still covered.
Sigh.
I struggled a few hours with Visual Studio and read several rant-filled blogs. I must admit I came close to flipping my table and throwing my laptop across the room. For those of you that don’t know me – I’m typically a very calm person.
As a solution, I decided to take the Virtual PC approach. That will allow me to run Windows XP inside of Windows Vista – and thus continue to work. Virtual PC 2007 is a free download from Microsoft. I know that sounds lame, but it should work fine.
There is one upside to this debacle. I now have a development environment that can quickly be recovered. One of the most frustrating parts of my job is the downtime after reinstalling my computer. A typical reinstall includes VS 2003, VS 2005, MS SQL Server, Photoshop, Oracle Client, a few toolkits, and other apps that I can’t remember. Now I only have to reinstall the host OS and copy my “.vmc” file. I estimate this should cut my down time in half. Not too shabby.
Visual studio should work on Vista. But, I needed to find an upside – if only to prevent myself from flinging my laptop against the wall.
Filed under: Disaster Recovery, Rants, Virtual PC, Vista, Visual Studio
