Windows 7: Vista Renamed!

Sorry I haven’t been around much as I’m sure my friends Scott Gu and Soma missed my blog entries but I spent the last month on site with a client from Louisville Ky, fixing yet another Visual Studio application abortion written by some over zealous Microsoft technology cheerleader.

While onsite one of the things the client asked was if the VS application would run on Windows 7. Given I prefer to wait until service pack 2 is released before using a Microsoft product, vista proved 2 service packs may not even be enough. I honestly told the client it should but then again it is a Microsoft product so who knows.

So one of their helpdesk people and I found a XP machine and decided to try it out. It didn’t take long at all to have my first WTF moment, apparently Windows 7 does not have an XP upgrade path. Therefore we ended up reformatting the machine which is probably a good idea anyway but still this is the lack of thought shows just how pathetic Microsoft is. What were they thinking everyone uses Vista?

The Windows 7 operating system is not sexy and looks for the most part like Vista with poorly implemented stolen inspiration from KDE and Mac. Not surprising they took the worse part of office 2007 (the suck ribbon bar) and implemented it all over the place in the OS. At least Microsoft’s lack of innovation reputation is still intact.

While the Windows 7 OS seemed a bit snappier then Vista, then again what OS isn’t, it was still not as quick as XP. Of course there was a crash right after installation due to a video device driver problem (what a fing joke) and without hacking the registry, as least that I could find, you could not install unsigned device drivers.

One thing I did find very interesting is the lack of WPF used in Windows 7. Given WPF has been out for more then 2 years you would think Microsoft’s own internal development would have used this great framework (yeah I even laughed at that one). It seems the only package Microsoft is releasing with a WPF UI is VS 2010 and even that will be some hybrid UI, according to my friend, Soma’s blog,

At the end of the day we were able to get the application running on Windows 7 but my first impression is Windows 7 amounts to nothing more then Vista Service pack 7000 and far from anything to get overly excited about unfortunately. Windows 7 is simply just another attempt to fix the magnitude of issues in Vista.

.Mark