Now that it has shipped, it is time to move to Vista for my primary development work. My plan is to use Vista and Office 2007 on a daily basis on both my desktop and laptop, and to have secondary drives with XP and Office 2003. Yesterday, I started with the desktop.

I installed Vista Ultimate on a clean drive. And of course, I once again forgot that IIS is not installed by default, even though I have installed Windows 10-15 times since this became the default. Happily, SQL Server and Visual Studio remind me of this when I install them.

When you turn on the IIS feature in Vista (notice that you turn this feature on, you don't install it ), don't forget to also turn on the Web Management Tools feature. IIS 7 ships with Vista and has a snazzy new UI for IIS Manager. Also, check out www.iis.net, Microsoft's IIS site. Lots of good articles there.

Next, I installed SQL Server 2005, which incorrectly informed me that IIS was not installed. Who are you going to believe, your own eyes or some dialog? Shortly thereafter, I got this message:

It turns out that SQL 2005 is not supported on Vista without SQL SP2. That's fine. SQL shipped a year ago and I will happily install a Service Pack. However, SQL SP2 is not done yet. It is only available as a CTP (Community Technical Preview). I know that Vista just shipped, and I know that very few people are rushing to put it into production in the first month, but I would have thought that Microsoft's flagship database would be ready to go when Microsoft's flagship OS was done. Maybe I'm just being nit picky and impatient.

Tossing aside my concerns about using CTPs and my desire to use only shipping software, I finished the SQL install and installed SP2 CTP. It too incorrectly told me IIS was not installed. It also displayed this message:

Prior to Vista, if you were an admin on your computer, you could be an admin on SQL Server using Windows Authentication. However, in Vista, this only happens if you are running as an admin with elevated privileges, which is not the default and is discouraged. So when you install SP2, you should expliciltly add yourself as a SQL admin. Check out the SP2 readme for more info on this.  

SQL is now installed. Next up is Visual Studio. Once again, there are compatibility issues.

These issues are being addressed in VS 2005 SP1, which is in non-public beta right now.

I will post an entry around VS 2005 and Vista soon, but for now, I'll wrap this up. VS installed and then I installed Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition. I still need to install SP2 for SQL Express, which I will do today.

I'll keep you posted on what I find and how development life in Vista goes.