Windows 7

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Anyone running the release version of Windows 7? It became available last week for MSDN subscribers so I installed it on my work computer.

I figured out the trick for my work computer. Doesn't matter what OS I have installed because now my work is 100% from virtual machines (just like MS does it with their team foundatation setup). I have virtual machines of Vista, XP, Win7, Server2k3/2k8 and different flavor compbinations of SQL Server.

So now my work computer is running a released and activated copy of Win 7 ultimate x64, and the memory upgrade to 8 gigs will be here later in the week.

It's a beautiful setup. Used to be if my work computer took a shit then it would be 12-16 hours reinstalling everything and hoping my backups were current. Now I can even switch to a different OS (or even a different physical computer) in under an hour! Power to the peoples!

Thoughts on Win7? I like it a lot. I liked Vista but I had too many problems with it, and Win7 has much better performance. I like some of the new ways they do the taskbar preview too.

[Taxious]

I had the beta of windows 7 and was pretty pleased. Since graduation, I've lost my subscription to MSDN so I doubt I'll ever get a full copy.

like MS does it with their team foundatation setup

I know it's off topic, but how do you feel about TFS? My first version control system was subversion (for work and school) but lately I've had the displeasure of working with TFS.

I feel like I'm missing something. SVN was 10x faster and provides many extras that TFS can't do (why can't TFS do simple things like ignore local changes?!?) and it's free...

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Still loving Windows 7. It's so much more efficient with memory and also I doubled my RAM to 8 gigs - like a double happy whammy. Sweet so far. It's 100% stable, about twice as fast as Vista, and I even left the UAC turned on. Normally I turned it off about 10 seconds after installing Vista.

I've never used TFS, Tax. I know what it is and how it works, and I've love to use it. But we're not a very team oriented company, most of the devs have been doing nothing but COBOL for the last 20 years (even Windows is new to them) and everyone works from home mostly on their own projects for their own clients and there's not much overlap on their projects.

The last company I worked for, this company was a vendor to, and I was usually the one in the meetings saying "but these guys are like 20 years behind". Well then I got laid off, came here, and now my job for the last 5 years has been to change that. It's the old complain about the food and you wind up the cook routine. So I've finally just got some of the cobol peeps running Vista and checking in their 20 year old cobol projects into Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. Only 4 of us are running Source Safe 2008, and only 2 seriously.

So we're a ways off from TFS unless I can make it so compelling that the sky is falling. But I've bee tantalizing some of the more advanced peeps with tales of virtualization and abundant cores, so maybe someday soon...

[Taxious]

So we're a ways off from TFS unless I can make it so compelling that the sky is falling. But I've bee tantalizing some of the more advanced peeps with tales of virtualization and abundant cores, so maybe someday soon...

Well my point was that Subversion > TFS so I'd recommend Subversion if you wind up needing a version control system. Save yourself some $$ and headaches.

I even left the UAC turned on

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Subversion works with Microsoft OSs, tools and environments? I dunno, I've been a pure MS shop since about 1991...

Even when I can get interest in some of these new technologies at our company, I often run into "but my work computer is running Windows 98 with 128 M of RAM" /sigh. Oh well, at least we're running version control company-wide and some of us are running semi-modern local development environments.

[Select]

I'll probably be able to get 7 for free soon through the school. I'm so iffy, though, since I've always been happy with XP and I'm not using my computer for all that much where I'd really need to upgrade. Also still sitting at 2G since I haven't had the extra cash to upgrade.

[Ddrak]

Been running Win7 since beta 1 and have absolutely loved it. The new taskbar is awesome, and I use the mouseover-higlighting of windows with alt-tab a *lot* to find the one I need. Turned UAC off, but mainly because when doing service/daemon development it just gets annoying really quickly. The mouse movements to control windows rock too (move to top to maximize, pull off top to restore, move to side to go 50% wide, shake to minimize everything else, etc.). Still waiting on the accountants at work to renew my MSDN sub so I can get a key for the release build. /sigh.

On Subversion, it integrates with Windows better than it does with most OSS operating systems. Check out http://tortoisesvn.net for an explorer plugin and http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/ for Visual Studio integration. We use it exclusively and my only real issue is it doesn't scale so well on a code base with tens of thousands of files when trying to keep a proper merge/branch structure under control. Before I extern'ed a bunch of stuff, merges could take a few minutes. If git or mercurial were more mature on Windows, I'd jump to them in a heartbeat.

TFS is far more than version control, it does the whole lifecycle and issue management as well. It's just rather expensive, which is why we use Subversion for source control; Jira for defect tracking and FishEye/Crucible for code reviews. Works pretty well as a coordinated system and I'd cautiously recommend it as something I've had little issues with in a nest of very mediocre products. TeamCity has proven a good build system for us as well. On TFS itself, I've heard good things from friends using it in their workplace as a Scrum management tool.

Err... Sourcesafe? Get yourself onto Subversion at the very least. You won't be sorry. Just make sure you read the book first and follow their advice on the tags/branches/trunk structure. Sounds like overhead at first, but you'll come to love it!

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Didn't know about shaking the windows - sweet, thanks for the tip. Yeah, I love the new task bar. The design is flawless and so is the integration between the task bar and all the windows.

Microsoft has the virtualization now built into Windows, but it's an add on so I wonder if they're going to include it in a service pack. It was a bloody hassle setting up. It now requires hardware level virtualization and login credentials on the guest OS but once it's setup right it's badass. I can plug in a flash drive or use my bluetooth headphones on a virtual machine!

Thanks again for the tip on Subversion guys. I'll do some homework on it and wait a couple months for my brain to come back up to full steam before I make any company decisions lol. SourceSafe aint that hot, but it's super simple and most of our devs aren't going to be doing labels, branching, pinning, etc.

Stupid brain injury - I think I was getting TFS mixed up with the new virtualization technology that MS uses to wrap it nowadays. TFS/Subversion is just the project team integration/source code control yah? What I want to do is push everyone their own work machine, probably specific to a project, and have everything installed that they'll need. A couple of the guys could probably write code (or at least compile the project) if they had a machine where everything is setup and all they have to do is GET the project and compile and run it.

So we start a project and I say "here's your windows 7 (virtual) computer with all the development tools installed: Compiler, database, version control, email, etc." That's how I think we'll all be working a couple years from now.

[Ddrak]

You're possibly thinking about MDOP (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterp ... fault.aspx), and specifically the MED-V stuff in it?

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Yeah, I think the MS blogs I was reading they were pushing the VPC images (MED-V) using Small Business Server or something like that, and all their VPCs have VS2008 TFS, SQL Server, etc. Microsoft is doing some badass stuff.

So yeah, I've been thinking that Windows 7 + (some sort of) Team System + Virtualization = The Win.

Windows 7 runs no problem as a guest OS under Windows 7. It's weird, but it works great.

And not a lot of people know that Windows 7 comes with a free virtual install of Windows XP. They call it "Windows XP Mode" but it's realy just a virtual machine running XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtua ... nload.aspx

[Minute]

Got it & like it. Probably enough to upgrade from XP64. Fucking hated Vista, but Windows 7 seems to be Vista with most everything fixed. Though I am interested in all the advances that the next Ubuntu version in October too. Especially for my laptop.