Hey All,
While perusing the InfoWorld site today and seriously considering whether or not I want to drop my free subscription (most of their writers are complete idiots (layman term that they'll understand)), I came across the writings of Randall Kennedy. This is one guy who actually understands what it means to be a developer that works on multiple Microsoft platforms. Unfortunately, most of his critics have no understanding of this concept, thus their comments.
He did the same thing that I did and switched to Windows 2008 Server for use as a workstation. Anyone who does REAL ASP.NET work knows that the only way to properly write a well written ASP.NET server application is to do the development on a server version of the OS. If you don't, you will run into several installation and operational issues when you try to deploy your applications. Since he wrote a "4 month later" post about his experiences, I thought that I should as well. Here are a few links to his posts:
Just as he says, I can verify that there is absolutely no comparison between Vista and Windows 2008 Server. Windows 2008 Server wins hands down and for me has even turned out to work better than Windows Server 2003, though just slightly slower. The desktop performance tests were done in such a way as to try to slow down the OS that is being compared to Vista as much as possible, and trying to increase the speed of Vista as much as possible, thus the actual differences under normal use are even greater. I personally have noticed a 2-4x improvement over Vista when running Windows 2008 Server and that included graphic intensive games (i.e. WoW).
I do need to write an update to my Bluetooth for Windows Server 2008 post as I discovered a way to natively give support to all of the devices that Microsoft chose to only give to non-server versions of the OS. It basically requires you to navigate to several OS driver folders and remove all of the "...1" text snippets that you find. I'll probably write a small app to do it automatically and make the source code available.
If you have an MSDN subscription with access to Windows 2008 Server, I seriously recommend that you use it. You do need to keep the UAC turned on as it is now so tightly wound into the system that turning it off will cause you nightmares. To debug in Visual Studio you will need to "Run as Administrator", but that is just 1 extra click when you start. Once you've converted it for use as a workstation, you will be more than happy with it as a development environment. I have the Aero desktop fully working and it way outperforms another workstation that I have running the 64 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate that is a newer machine.
If you have converted over, let me know your experiences. Take it easy...