Gave it a spin in a VirtualBox VM today. Seems OK I guess, not much point echoing the facts people have already mentioned, performance etc.

The spilt windows thing is OK, still nobody has resolutions wide enough to make use of it unless you use >1920x1200. I use a portrait display anyway so that was useless to me. Dragging the window to the top of the screen to maximise? WTF, there's a button for that, there always has been. They do add some pointless features.

I quite like the taskbar, no need to have the program names there once you know what the icons mean. A bit like the OS X dock I guess.

Action center and control panel seem a little better than Vista, although I see 'set up a wireless device' way too many times.

...And then there's IE8. Haven't used this before due to it being beta etc. Fire it up, first site I go to is the latest web application I'm working on. Positioning is out. Thank you m$, so that'll be ANOTHER conditional stylesheet then

Quote from pb32000 :

...And then there's IE8. Haven't used this before due to it being beta etc. Fire it up, first site I go to is the latest web application I'm working on. Positioning is out. Thank you m$, so that'll be ANOTHER conditional stylesheet then

So it's not just me then? IE8 seems to handle divs different then previous versions but I haven't figured out yet where to fix it.

Quote from three_jump :

So it's not just me then? IE8 seems to handle divs different then previous versions but I haven't figured out yet where to fix it.

Yer it's all gone to shit. Bearing in mind I'm using an absolutely positioned div here, which TBF is created and positioned dynamically using jQuery, IE8 can't work it out properly. In compatibility mode (I assume falls back to IE7) its fine, as it is when tested in native IE7 (god knows what 6 would do with it).

IE8 will need conditional stylesheets sadly.

Quote from pb32000 :

Yer it's all gone to shit. Bearing in mind I'm using an absolutely positioned div here, which TBF is created and positioned dynamically using jQuery, IE8 can't work it out properly. In compatibility mode (I assume falls back to IE7) its fine, as it is when tested in native IE7 (god knows what 6 would do with it).

IE8 will need conditional stylesheets sadly.

so business as usual:
modern_browser.css
old_ie.css
ie7.css
ie8.css

at least they are consistent with it...

Due to my Vista installation giving up on me, and me not being arsed to reinstall it and find all my x64 drivers, I'm now using 7 as my main OS. It works damn nice at it too, even in its beta stage it's far more reliable and compatible than Vista.

One thing I noticed when playing with vLite though - they've named it Windows 6.1

Quote from dougie-lampkin :

One thing I noticed when playing with vLite though - they've named it Windows 6.1

Cause that's the version number of the kernel. It's a slighty improved Vista, but due the "bad" name Vista has the PR departed said: "We're gonna make it a 7".

It's a Windows Vista SE (second edition)

The 6.1 is simply for compatability.

Quote :

Microsoft developers have a ready explanation for the phenomenon. Many programs check the version number of the operating system and will not install if the number falls outside a specified range. Microsoft insists that virtually all programs that run on Vista will run without alteration of Windows 7 and it doesn't want installations to bomb just because of a failed version number check. So what is officially known as the "major version number" was kept at 6.

So instead of letting idiot programmers pay and then learn from their mistakes, Microsoft once again bends over backwards to keep their POS code running. Their whole platform is completely littered with stupid legacy decisions like that and it's just disgusting.

I mean how mind numbingly stupid do you have to be to limit the major version your app will run in to the current one? Why are Microsoft helping these idiots out?

Quote from wien :

I mean how mind numbingly stupid do you have to be to limit the major version your app will run in to the current one? Why are Microsoft helping these idiots out?

Smart programmers do that because you don't want changes in some MS API from Windows 6.0 to 7.0 make your program eat the user's whole eMail database. That's why you don't let your program run on software that isn't even in the same branch of development as what you tested on.

MS should've called it Windows 6.1 because it is Windows 6.1. The marketing department is merely looking for a reason to sell new licenses to windows 6.0-customers.

Vain

So, any idea how much this up and coming release is going to cost?

Quote from Vain :

Smart programmers do that because you don't want changes in some MS API from Windows 6.0 to 7.0 make your program eat the user's whole eMail database.

No, that would be "overly pedantic programmers" or "Germans".

In some cases, when handling extremely important data, there could be some value in testing stuff to that level and then blocking off "unsupported" versions, but frankly MS could screw up just the same in every update coming through Windows Update. Furthermore, you'd have backup (right??). The version check is completely arbitrary since even with an "approved version" you have no idea what code is running underneath it.

If Microsoft find themselves changing an API to the point where it's doing something completely different they should make the programmers explicitly state what API they want. (Win32 api = new Win32("6.0")) Leaving this responsibility to the programmer and then just changing things around willy-nilly in established APIs would be plain stupidity.

Quote from NightShift :

So, any idea how much this up and coming release is going to cost?

Don't know yet, although i would like to think they could give Vista user's a discount maybe?

As Vista is still pretty new.

Quote from mclarenmatt :

As Vista is still pretty new.

Yes only 2 years old, and not really cheap to begin with

As Vista didn't appear to be so well received from business and retail customers (it gest most of its market share out of the preinstalled copies), I wonder if they're going to offer a direct upgrade for XP licenses too.

Quote from pb32000 :

...And then there's IE8. Haven't used this before due to it being beta etc. Fire it up, first site I go to is the latest web application I'm working on. Positioning is out. Thank you m$, so that'll be ANOTHER conditional stylesheet then

I've been following the beta on a separate installation and it seems that so far they've drastically changed the way it handled positioning twice. I can only assume they'll change it again.

Yer won't be developing for it specifically just yet. However it managed to handle some more complex stuff I was doing yesterday with ease so I'll let it off for now