Most people will be aware that the first Beta for Windows Vista (formally codename Longhorn) was officially released to MSDN Subscribers during the week.  As with most people I thought - oh no, not another massive download.  Well I was right, but luckily here in Japan the broadband is ultra fast and it took me just under 20mins to download the 2.4Gb ISO image.  Anyhow, it then took me 40mins to burn it to DVD (slow burner on my laptop) before I could install it on a VPC image, which took a couple of hours.

Once installed it actually loaded relatively quickly and so far has been performing much better than my initial expectations. Being the developer I am I of course wanted to install Visual Studio, so pulling out the DVD I tried to install it, only to be told that the XML parser wouldn't install.  This of course is a primary dependency and VS won't install without it.  Luckily there was a post on the web that suggested just running it from the folder on the DVD - did that and hey presto a couple of hours later we have VS successfully installed.

As a side discussion, one of the interesting things about Windows Vista is that whenever you try to do something that requires Administrative privileges on the local machine, it prompts you to re-authenticate.  While I can understand the logic behind this, it is very infuriating as it re-prompts every time you want to install something (let me know if you find a way to turn this off!).  The most annoying thing from my part is that it doesn't work properly.  I typically log into my domain with a username in the format <username>@<full domain>. For some reason if you use a username in this format it doesn't allow you to continue.  However if you use the NT name (ie <domain>\<username>) it works fine. 

While we are looking at bugs in Vista, the other one is that at login, there doesn't seem to be a way to "dial a connection" prior to logging in.  This is useful if you have to VPN into you corporate network prior to authenticating.  A work around that makes use of a neat feature in Vista is that you can log in as a local user, connect to the vpn and then switch users.  In WinXP you could switch users, but only if you weren't connected to a domain.  Now you can do it with domain users - very cool.  If I'm developing code, I can be doing this as a user with adiministrative permissions.  Then I can switch users to one with minimal permissions to see if my application is behaving properly.

Anyway, back to my installation discussion.  So now with VS installed I realised that I should also install WinFX (which for some reason isn't installed by default - that's Avalon and Indigo) and the appropriate SDK.  Following the instructions in the HTML file on the desktop I successfully install WinFX, but the site that it sent me to for the SDK was particularly useless as there was no obvious place to download it from.  Anyhow a quick google found the appropriate site.

The next problem that I encountered is that the SDK wouldn't install, claiming that I had insufficient privileges.  As discussed earlier, all the other applications I have installed have requested these permissions.  Turns out that you can elect to "Run as Elevated..."  which forces the system to prompt and then run the system with administrative permissions - very cool.

So, I'll leave my installation story there, because I'm still waiting for the SDK to complete installation.  The results for the Yokohama round will be announced this evening, so I will be back later to pass on some additional comments about the competition.