What does a Tableteer do on the eve of Christmas? Why install the December community build of Vista of course. Pete Wright pens a Christmas poem to share his experience.
I too installed Vista on a Tablet this week. I’ve got it running on the Gateway M280 and from a developer’s perspective I’m quite pleased.
I had tried the earlier 5230 build and unfortunately I didn’t have much luck with testing some of my ink apps.
It’s different now in the December build of Vista. Yeah, there are some hangs and hickups, but there’s more than enough for me to hunker down and develop with.
I installed Visual Studio 2005 with WinFX and Workflow extensions. Everything seems to be working quite well, although I’ve only written a couple toy test apps.
Oh, one thing I’ve noticed as I pop back and forth between the XP world and Vista land. I’m already hooked on the new look and feel of Vista. It sure didn’t take long to begin to feel comfortable in the new glass windows, leave behind the verbose “My” mindset (as in “My Computer” or “My Documents”–user files are now in a Users folder), navigate the cleaner Start and Program Files “menus”, and on and on.
There are some things I’m getting used to. Windows Explorer seems “thicker.” I imagine this is a signal that I’m missing out on the added power and flexibility of the shell.
And I forgot to mention how cool Vista makes my existing Tablet apps look. No recompiling needed. Nice.
Bugs aside–hey this is beta stuff, you know–I’m getting really excited about developing for Vista. Yes, Vista’s launch is sometime out in the future, but time flys and I want to stay in sync with Vista’s improvements in Windows. This is an area, in fact, where Tablets do best. Tablets and innovation go together.