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Developers cautiously welcome Vista

Ingrid Marson in Los Angeles Builder UK

Published: 15 Sep 2005 12:25 BST

The majority of developers that Builder UK spoke to at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on Wednesday were enthusiastic about the appearance and features of Vista.

Michael Burgun, a consultant at UK consultancy Centrelink Systems, said the user interface was "very slick". Rom Mannien, a developer at Dutch defence organisation DTO, said the changes in the user interface would probably improve the experience for novice computer users, but were irrelevant to him. Other developers were excited about the features for developers in Vista. Software developer Mike Roberts said the most interesting parts about Vista is its Web services architecture Indigo and its graphics engine Avalon. He was also excited by the new file system WinFS, even though this has been dropped from the initial release of Vista.

But many developers warned that companies are unlikely to migrate to Vista for a number of years. Nicolas Macarez, a consultant at Nil Consulting in France, said his clients were unlikely to migrate to Vista until they bought a new PC. "Nobody is going to move to Vista — Windows XP is good enough," said Macarez. "I support around 150 people at 20 clients and they are not going to migrate an XP box to Vista. It will only be when we buy new computers with Vista pre-installed that they will migrate."

Dutch defence organisation DTO is also unlikely to migrate in the near future, according to Mannien. "We just switched from NT 4 to 2003 on servers, and to XP on workstations. It will be at least five years before we switch again."

As Microsoft is making Indigo, Avalon and WinFS available on Windows XP, some developers may choose to stick with Microsoft's latest operating system rather than migrating.

One feature that may encourage companies to migrate to Vista is the improved deployment capabilities. Microsoft claims that Vista will be "easier than ever" to deploy due to the addition of various deployment technologies and tools, according to the company's Web site.

Developer Mike Roberts said the deployment tools could persuade companies to migrate sooner, as could the new look and feel of Vista. "Corporations might wait till Longhorn server comes out before migrating, or the deployment and management tools might be so good that they decide to move earlier," said Roberts. "Also, Vista looks really fancy so people might go for that."

UK consultant Michael Burgun said the user interface is unlikely to persuade businesses to move. "[The Vista user interface] is something that consumers are really going to love. But, I don't know that it will make a difference to corporate customers — they don't like things to look flash and sexy," he said.

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So if you upgrade to XP SP3 you can't uninstall Internet Explorer, I'm quite sure I'm having a Deja-vu feeling about MS preventing people from uninstalling Internet Explorer in other Windows products.