More on Vista

It was a pleasure to read Mark Wilson's summary of my Vista talk last week at the IT Forum redlivered event at Microsoft. As usual, he's done a first class job at summarising the talk.

This talk was challenging on a couple of levels. First, I was not able to run the latest (Dec) CTP on my laptop - which was a bit of a bummer to say the least. But I managed to get it running on a desktop I had a home. The box only had 512MB of memory, so to get the demo to run at anything like reasonable speed, I had to buy some more ram (out of my own pocket).

The second challenge was the slide deck itself was pretty marketing oriented - an approach that I know from many years presenting at TVP really does not go down well with the UK audience. So I used the deck as the basis for both explaining some of the background, and as the focus for the demos. I'm glad Mark recognised this approach for what it was!

The third challenge was the product itself. I am running the December CTP relase - and it's slow, buggy and incomplete. But big deal - it's beta - and the bugs really aren't the message. And of course, if it were fast, bug free and complete, it'd not be beta, if you see what I mean. The demos showed a bunch of the cool new features, such as the great new event log intereface. But in looking at it, you also see how many hundred critical and major error events were logged which diverts a bit from the core feature message. As Mark pointed out, my demos were around what you are going to be able to do with Vista (and less about the current state of the engineering effort). I'm told that the next CTP, due out very, very soon, should both load on my laptop and be much quicker on the desktop. I'm looking forward to having more evidence around both of these shortly!