Al Pascual

Upgrading developer machine to Windows Vista Ultimate

I would like to share my experience with you upgrading my developer machine to Windows Vista. I hope the issue I found on my way will help others. Although the installations is the smoothest installation I've ever seen, the after math was worse than expected. I'll walk you through all the steps and all the issue and problems, as well as a few things that are important to know 

I found 3 major issues that weren't explain anywhere after the installation. As well I did not like that when trying to run a program from the Control Panel, if you do not run it "as administrator" will give you an error as didn't find the file, instead of you don't have enough permission to run this program. 

Issues

• Install VS2005 Service Pack 1. Look at the reason why on the Microsoft link
• Disable the User Access Control, no point really to have that, if I login I want to be the administrator. For a developer machine, this is very important, as you won't be able to install ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.
• Main issue is ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0 won't work as there is a policy that will try to use AJAX 3.5 in Visual Studio 2005. To fix that issue, you need to run this script. Make sure VS2005 is closed before running the script. In Vista run it as administrator, or make sure the UAC is disabled. Great resource to explain the issue here

Now, after fixing all these issues above, I'm pretty happy with the result machine. Now I have a developer machine with Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008 relese version from Microsoft; only MSDN subscribers can download it. I have ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and 3.5 as well as Silverlight 1.1. Everything works fine and great user experience.

I did also plug in a ReadyBoost 2 GB USB key without any difference on the speed of my computer.

Cheers

Al