• Explorer was not very user friendly to me.  I love doing everything in detail view, and it seemed like not matter what I did Vista was trying to guess the way I should be viewing my folders.  I downloaded and used a third party Explorer tool.  Anyone have Norton Commander for Vista?
• Driver support was poor.  I don't blame Microsoft for this, in fact I'm not blaming them at all, just mentioning what I didn't like.
• Administrator Dialogs.  This really started getting on my nerves.  I can understand maybe the first time I try to do something an Admin should you ask me if I really want to, but can't I check a box or something so I won't get asked over and over.
• Memory usage.  This was just out of control.  When I finally gave in Thursday night, I was running Visual Studio and Outlook plus one Virtual Machine in VMWare.  I was using my entire 2GB of RAM and was paging like crazy.  I went to bed mad, leaving it like that.  I got up Friday morning to shut it down and get to the office and I was using less than 1GB.  Seems over 1GB of garbage was collected overnight.  To compare (and I tested the multiple time), when I went back to XP, the same tasks had me using 700MB of RAM, leaving me plenty for other tasks and no paging.
• Networking pains.  This could be an entirely different list, but to keep it short I'll just say I had a lot of trouble with my VPN working correctly, and the Private/Public network thing is just plain annoying, especially when Vista would guess which one it thought I needed and switch it when I rebooted.  Many times Vista would also disable my network adapater without asking.
• Permissions.  This was crazy, and I never could figure out many of my issues.  One was with one of our own software application.
• Visual Studio.  Now of all things you would have thought this would have worked with no problem.  A known issue with Microsoft was VS and Vista working together.  I had decent luck until I installed SP1 for Visual Studio... beware, you have been warned.

That's all I can really think of right now.  Will I go back to Vista?  Of course I will, we all will eventually, but for now I'm going to focus on being productive with XP.

Chris

I had blogged a couple weeks ago about the new Snipping Tool in Vista and about how it was going to replace Snag-It. Well I must say that I must retract that as I just installed Snag-It for the following reasons:

• Clipping Tool can't be executed with hot keys (that I can tell) and therefore can't always capture what need, such as the Application Menu in Office 2007 client applications.
• Clipping Tool saves to clipboard as an odd format because I can't paste into my favorite Icon program, which is Axialis. This forced me to use Paint or something archaic as an intermediate step.
• Image cleanup is very limited compared to Snag-It.

Those are enough reasons for me, and besides Snag-It is cheap.

Have a good week,

Chris

I really like a lot of things about Vista, and I know when I really start to understand it I will be singing the praises of this new OS. In the mean time I am just completely frustrated. My latest rant happened when I was trying to get my post build events working in Visual Studio. In the past I had always kept a "Projects" folder in the root that contained every project I was currently working on. When I moved to VS 2005 full time I decided to start keeping my new projects in the Visual Studio 2005\Projects directory. This seemed to work fine and even made backups easier as everything I did was now contained under "My Documents". Last week I moved to Vista and as I started getting back into some coding this week I spent a good day pulling my hair out over something really dumb.

I noticed that my post build events were no longer executing, and of course causing my build to fail. The post build events are a must because I was debugging some assemblies in our new Capture product that are late bound. I spent the first couple hours trying to figure out what had changed in my events (shown below).

copy $(TargetPath) "..\..\..\..\Application\bin\debug\Plugins\Win\$(TargetFileName)" /Y

copy $(TargetDir)$(TargetName).pdb "..\..\..\..\Application\bin\debug\Plugins\Win\$(TargetName).pdb" /y

This all seemed simple enough and worked fine with XP, but why did I now error with an exit code of 0? I changed the target directories to something very simple, like c:\temp and still no luck… exit code 0. The error messages were showing the full paths showing me that the directories seemed fine.

c:\users\chris.caplinger\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\KnowledgeLake\Capture\4.0\KnowledgeLake.Capture.Win

I took the commands being executed from the error message and decided to simply drop them into a command line window, and of course the copy failed. This made no sense as the directories were correct. I changed to the source directory and tried it again and Wham!, it worked. I have no idea on why this behavior is happening and figure it's probably a bug or a feature I could live without. After some more experiments I determined that the "c:\user" path is screwing everything up. Maybe this has something to with the new shadow folder since this used be "c:\documents and settings". I have just come to the realization for now that you can't copy stuff from paths in the "User" folder on the command line unless you are in that specific directory. And even then you won't be able to copy to other folders under "User".

The only fix I could come up with was to move all my projects back to "c:\projects", which resolved the problem and got me back on my way. Hopefully you get to read this before you spend several hours in frustration.

Chris

This is more of a plea than a post. If anyone knows how to make legacy TWAIN and WIA devices work with Windows Vista please drop me a line and let me know. I did a fresh installation of Vista Ultimate and have not succeeded in getting any of my three scanners working. I made the not so intelligent assumption that Windows XP driver "should" work in most cases.

Chris