saadware

The short of the answer is hell yes.

Here goes a bit longer answer… but first:

** Begin Disclaimer **

My current profession involves working on a Windows platform. To be blunt… exclusive Windows platform development. However, I did most of my early learning on Unix/Linux and never really hit the Windows platform until I was out in the “real world”. That being said, I exclusively use a Mac at home, for no particular reason but that I enjoy diversifying.

** End Disclaimer **

I recently upgraded my development box to Windows Vista Enterprise edition because I started to realize that I wasn’t living in the now. It’s so easy to get caught up in the criticism that Vista has faced, and continues to face. However, it started to dawn on me that I’m not the target audience for all these criticisms. These are mainly for consumers that need to make an informed decision on whether or not they want to fork over the money to upgrade to this latest version. Pish posh! I don’t care.

As developers we need to stay current or we face falling behind. Somebody at some point in time will be attempting to run your application on Windows Vista. How will it behave and when it doesn’t behave well, who looks bad? Microsoft maybe, but this person has already bought into Windows and there is probably some other program out there that does similar things as yours and does run on Vista.

Is this fear driven? No. It’s just being smart and going with the flow. Vista is out and it’s here to stay for a while. People are upgrading and buying new machines with it pre-installed. What the hell are we fighting? As a developer, it’s our duty to stay current and continuing to evolve with the technology changes.

I don’t care what anyone tells you, there are some significant changes in Vista that need to be noticed from a development stand point. For me, I’ve been running it for 4 weeks now and I can honestly say that I have no reason to go back to XP. (This is me wearing both my consumer hat and developer hat.)

XP was great and served its purpose. However, my Windows development experiences need to continue evolving and therefore Vista is the way to enable that growth.

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