Windows 7 RTM was recently released to MSDN subscribes and I decided to install it last week. I had already tried RC and was impressed but did not spend as much time using it as I would have liked. This time I decided, let’s go for it and install Windows 7 RTM with all my developer applications and tools. The installation of Windows 7 RTM went smoothly with no hick ups at all. The next step was to create a VHD from the Windows 7 install DVD, natively from Windows 7. That’s right for those of you that haven’t heard Windows 7 has native support for VHD (only Ultimate and Enterprise version have this). In fact, Windows 7 boot manager will boot a VHD and it will run natively and with the exception of the hard drive the hardware used by the booted VHD is physical. Scott Hansleman has posted on this subject and has instructions on how to setup and boot a VHD.
After creating a VHD and adding it to the boot manager, I proceeded to install all my developer applications. here is the list of applications I installed.
- Visual Studio 2008
- Visual Studio 2008 SP1
- NUnit
- RhinoMocks
- TortoiseSVN
- ASP.NET MVC
- Silverlight SDK
- testDriven.NET
- Reflector
- Firefox and Firebug
- Fiddler
- AnkhSVN
If you are not familiar with some of these tools and want a description then please visit my toolbox site.
Afterwards I took some of my applications namely, My Site (ASP.NET MVC), My Silverlight Gallery, and GTANETCC (asp.net), compiled and ran them and they all behaved as expected.
Needless to say, the experience was great!
Next came CodeRush Xpress a great refactoring tool available for free from Developer Express. I installed the tool and then noticed that the refactoring was not available when I ran Visual Studio 2008. The product was installed but did not load. Selecting the DevExpress menu item and then the Load option caused the Invalid index. (Exception form HRESULT:0x800200B (DISP_E_BDAINDEX)).
It turns out that the DevExpressToolsOrcas.Addin file is not installed in the correct location. The fix was rather simple, copy C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\DevExpressToolsOrcas.Addin to C:\Users\(USER)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins\DevExpressToolsOrcas.Addin
After that all the refactoring tools from CodeRush Xpress worked fine.
I have been using Windows 7 RTM for 5 days now and I have nothing bad to say about it and plenty good to say. This native support for VHD is wonderful. Windows 7 rocks!