A single pretty important thing to mention, which held me up half an hour or so – for some reason, the installation program for the SDK doesn’t work correctly when used with the mouse. Specifically, the Next button on the first page and the radio buttons to accept the license do their jobs only when used with the keyboard… I hope this will save somebody some time.

My installation of Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Architect doesn’t run through… I tried it twice and there’s a point where the current action is shown as “Removing registry entries” or something very similar to that, and that’s where suddenly some msiexec process starts gobbling up a lot of CPU and never terminates. Killing that process makes the setup process fail, but I don’t get any detailed information about the real issue, probably because the problem isn’t recognized by the MSI system. I’ll go with 2005 for the time being, but I hope I’ll find out later why this happens.

I just found out the hard way that low-level drivers like the Nero driver for the Image Drive feature may not be compatible with Vista at all. Right after I activated the driver, Vista crashed with a BSOD and I wasn’t able to boot back into it, not even in safe mode. I was able to use the Vista installation DVD to boot into the system recovery tools and restore the system from there using the last restore point. I’m sure this may be happening because I’m still on Nero 6… they never managed to explain to me why I should be updating to 7, maybe this is the first good reason.

Update: I can’t find any tool that lets me mount iso images on Vista… Microsoft’s own Virtual CD Control Panel doesn’t work either. Any hints?

Yesterday I managed to install Vista CTP build 5308 on my new Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi. This is what my BlogJet window looks like now:

In part it’s supposed to look like that, because the Glass effects of the new UI actually work pretty well on my system. In other parts it’s not as intended, for example where the menu bar is simply missing :-)

The installation itself was easy and without problems. Kudos to Microsoft – I’m sure the installation is a lot easier than it used to be, and this was always a problem with some groups of potential users. It takes pretty long and the only status information is a thin progress bar that slowly moves across the whole screen… some work to be done here, I guess.

Stability is great where the system as a whole is concerned, and I haven’t seen a single crash of any kind so far. I see a few drawing problems and also compatibility issues, similar to those in BlogJet above, but I guess the drawing issues may be due to the fact that my display driver is still for the previous CTP build. It also shows problems when putting the system to sleep or hibernating, as it never wakes up correctly. I hope ATI is going to have updated drivers available soon.

Other stability problems I have seen include the fact that some modules suddenly stopped working by now, after working just fine initially. The nice Alt-Tab task switcher is one example of that. Internet Explorer 7 never worked quite right to begin with, it looked like it didn’t load any CSS files at all. I can’t find out now, because it’s stopped working altogether since then. Oh well…

But who needs Alt-Tab switching if you can do Windows-Tab switching:

The new UI is really fantastic and I’m looking forward to doing some work with it in my own apps. So installing VS and the Vista version of the WinFX CTP will be the next thing.