Why I Can’t Upgrade My Development Machine to Vista
Posted on April 2, 2007, under Development, Operating Systems, Software.
I have a Vista Ultimate on a test machine, and lately I have been wanting to update my main development machine to Vista. Why? Well despite others being very unhappy with Vista, I am ready to switch. There is really no solid reason I need to switch over to Vista for, but I feel myself reliving the days when Windows XP was released. I was so unhappy with the new direction and some of the unneeded features of XP, I waited so long to switch to Windows XP from Windows 2000. No XP is a part of everyones daily life, and I have a feeling that sooner or later Vista will be a part of everyones life; whether we like it or not. I don’t want to be late to the game for Vista, not that I feel I am missing out on anything - I have just been so stuck in my ways in the past that I am trying to change that.
Yes, this is where all of the mac fans shout out “Walk away from the dark side!”, “Get a Mac”, etc., etc., etc. Well as much as I might like that, I develop for Windows… it’s what I get paid to do; so at this fork in my life converting to a Mac is not possible. So back to the point; why can’t I update to Vista? Well, here’s why:
The development team I work with is small, and we use older versions of software. We use older versions because the time and effort that it would take to update versions is too much. We are so small, and strapped for time as is: it would take time out of everyone’s schedule to up convert. For example Visual InterDev. We use Visual InterDev from the Visual Studio 6.0 days. Yes, old, yes our own fault. But we use Visual InterDev to manage our staging and production websites. Why? Well it’s easy for non “techies” to modify HTML code. As if retraining everyone on the new Vista compatible Visual InterDev wouldn’t be time consuming enough, we would have to update the server side as well. We use ASP classic, no .NET stuff. We have never needed any of the “features” that .NET brings so the investment in time and money was never worth it. Lastly, the decision on if Visual InterDev is best for our needs, or moving over to some CRM solution would need to be discussed. Then testing, installing, and training starts all over again.
Second Visual Studio: Again, we use Visual Studio .NET 2003 which we have reaad has mixed results with Vista. Moving over to the latest and greatest Visual Studio would require updating project files, SDK’s, etc. Yes not difficult, but time consuming.
Partly it’s our own fault for not keeping up with the latest and greatest from Microsoft all of these years. On the flip side of that coin, it’s unreasonable for a company like Microsoft to expect a company to always shell out loads of cash for the latest and greatest. Companies want a return on the investment for all of those licenses, and companies don’t like having to spend a bunch of money upgrading and retraining. But the bigger question that has to be asked is are these software products truly not compatible, or is Microsoft just being lazy about “supporting” them on Vista. I will say Microsoft has always been good about allowing backwards compatible, and I understand that some applications are just too old; but in our case I will not be able to give more money to Microsoft and upgrade to Vista on my development machine, because the applications I need at this moment don’t play well.
Upset? Yes a little. We share the blame a little here, but it’s discouraging that Microsoft expects us to revamp to all new versions to to be compliant with the operating system.
The last note that I should make is that since we are not developing on Vista, it makes it harder to develop for Vista; which in turn helps people convert over to new operating systems when they see cool application features that are Vista only.
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Matt Schwartz on April 3, 2007
After 10 years of professional software development on Windows I took a pay cut and switched to Linux development. I went from a senior VB/.NET/Oracle guy to a PHP/MySQL noob. And I’m MUCH happier. My office is all mac desktops and linux servers. I almost never touch Microsoft software.
I have less stress, work is a lot more fun, and the projects and code are more flexible. There’s a whole other world out there when you switch your job away from Microsoft development. I think it’s also made me a better programmer.