Just got back from a short, but very much needed, vacation. I went fishing at a nearby lake and it was sooo relaxing! This was the first actual vacation I have ever taken from work. I didn't catch any fish this time so the score is Fish: 1, Denny: 0. We'll see how it goes next time around ;)

I received my free copy of Windows Vista Business last week (powertogether.com ~ no more freebies available sorry). Although I had no intentions of installing it yet I ended up trying to upgrade my BIOS and destroyed my XP boot configuration. Destroying the boot config gave me an excuse to do a fresh install of Vista. I had some second thoughts about getting Visual Studio, SQL Server, IIS and my other apps to run on Vista but figured it would pan out.

After a quick installation (I was surprised) Vista was installed and on my first boot I had a blank screen. After a few reboots I realized I was running a dual screen setup and that the Vista startup screen was actually showing on my second monitor, which at the time was off (silly me). So after feeling dumb I completed the setup and it booted right up. The nVidia FX5500 graphics card held out for the Vista Aero interface though I will definitely be upgrading to an 8800. I had no problems installing Visual Studio 2005 or IIS though I did run across a few snags with SQL Server 2005.

I believe SQL Server 2005 kept killing my BOOTMGR and Vista would then need to be repaired from the CD after a reboot. I had to download the SQL Server 2005 service pack 2 (don't use the Windows Update method!). After trying a few Windows Updates on SQL Server 2005 I decided to manually download SP2 and install it which worked perfectly. I had to create a new instance because apparently the default instance was already used (not sure why).

Either way everything works great now and I run Visual Studio 2005 in Administrator mode for debugging purposes. Also VS2005 seems to have some graphics glitches after debugging though this may just be my video card. You have to install IIS7 from Windows Features but IIS7 rocks! I noticed a lot of my apps installed much quicker in Vista than in XP. It may be better support for my dual core or perhaps XP was just bloated. The Vista SideBar comes in very handy and there are quite a few gadgets available for it.

Overall I like Vista a lot more than I originally thought I would.