After visiting Microsoft TechNet Seminar everyone was quite excited about Windows 7 and everyone was saying that Windows 7 is far better then Vista and its now ready to go alive. I did stick to my plan of upgrading my development machine to Windows 7 only after Service Pack 1 arrives. But everybody argued that no its ready for developers even. Fine I tried to install it on my laptop which I rarely use for development and here is the experience.

It took drivers and it was pretty faster then Vista as far as installation goes, but then immediately I found two problems.

Move Files Progress Bar Bug

I took backup on my other D drive and I have both administrator and basic user and while copying files back on basic user I found this bug. When you are trying to move files, and if you are an administrator and it doesnt need any UAC permissions then you can see progress bar as shown below.

But if your destination folder/drive requires some UAC permission then the UAC dialog box comes and when you accept everything after that the progress bar no longer displays progress as shown below.

This happens if you try to copy something into windows/program files or anywhere for some other users when running from basic user.

And we have to wait endlessly for this window to get closed automatically and that probably proves that operation was successful.

I am really disappointed to see bugs on very critical operations like file operations are most crucial. Even on Vista, Move operation did not work correctly as it did not delete the source files/folders and that leaves us with confusion.

Canceling Move Operation Creates Inconsistencies

While the Move operation is on, if you decide to cancel, you are left in bad position because then you are left with half files from old location and half in new. Sure its not great problem as we can consolidate immediately.

Cant Install Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT)

This is really great bug, because on development machine, we really cant live without RSAT. We need them to manage servers. I found this link from live search, RSAT for Windows 7 . When I try to install this update it gave this error message “This update is not applicable for your computer”. Further more in Event Viewer, I got this message.

Windows update  could not be installed because of error 2149842967

I did report this bug to lot of places, hope it gets resolved soon, but I think on Microsoft Download website they should put some feedback about the item being downloaded.

Visual Studio 2008 Installation Problems

I am not sure whether VS 2008 installed successfully or not, because although it said it was successful, there were certain errors in Event Viewer.

Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – ENU — Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly ‘Microsoft.Windows.Design,
version=”3.5.0.0″,
publicKeyToken=”b03f5f7f11d50a3a”,
processorArchitecture=”MSIL”,
fileVersion=”9.0.30729.1″,
culture=”neutral”‘.
Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0×80070005. assembly interface: IAssemblyCacheItem, function: Commit, component: {7A515F16-7D3F-4A41-910A-E704ABC9E8CA}

I havent yet started using VS on 7 but I will soon and I am sure there will be many problems.

Cant Install Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

However when I tried to install Visual Studio 2008 Serivce Pack 1, it didnt install and gave following errors in log.

Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – ENU – Update ‘KB945140′ could not be installed. Error code 1603.

And another error at the last,

Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – ENU – Update ‘Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Design-Time Components for x86 – KB947888′ could not be installed. Error code 1603. Additional information is available in the log file C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1_20090913_140916022-Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – ENU-MSP0.txt.

Cant Install SQL 2008 Management Tools

I tried to install SQL 2008 Management Tools, it gave me compatibility issue and warned me that you must install SQL 2008 SP 1, I agreed. And I went ahead with installation and Installation stopped because Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 was not installed.

Conclusion

I think I am on conclusion that Windows 7 is not yet ready for Developers and they should wait for Windows 7 SP1 to arrive.  And it should only be used by Testing Teams to test the products.