Desmond File

Blog archive

Vista Launches...Again

Question: When is an OS launch not an OS launch? Answer: When the retail launch of Microsoft Windows Vista occurs a full two months after code had shipped to volume license customers.

That detail didn't prevent Microsoft from pulling out the stops in New York City on Monday, as it unveiled the long-awaited client operating system to the public. Redmond Channel Partner Editor in Chief Scott Bekker was in New York and describes the "orchestrated hoopla," including billboards sporting Vista and Office logos and staged live outdoor events. Further afield, Bekker writes that Microsoft "held a beach festival in Brazil, fireworks at the Eiffel Tower in Paris and arranged for ice sculpture displays in Sweden and Canada."

For development managers, the real question is how long it will take for Vista -- and its underlying foundation technologies in Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow -- to reach critical mass.

While new consumer PC shipments are switching to Vista right away, IDC Research Vice President Al Gillen told Bekker that enterprises will take their time. He expects many corporate IT departments to exercise downgrade right options on their Vista-ready contracts and load Windows XP on new systems instead. Gillen says it will be 2008 before new systems sales of Vista outpace those of Windows XP.

What is your company planning to do with Vista? Is a migration to the new OS in the works, and are your development plans changing to meet Vista? If your decision is to wait, tell us why! E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.

Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/31/2007


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

    The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.

  • Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

    Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.

  • Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

    Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.

  • AdaBoost Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.

  • Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

    Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.

Subscribe on YouTube