One of the things I love about my job is that the IT department gets the new toys and our old toys are filtered to the rest of the company. This puts the latest and greatest power machines in the hands of the power users which is the way things should be! I used to get quite offended when the management at a company would be sporting $3,000 tablet pcs to run powerpoint and outlook while the development team was running 2-3 year old hand me downs.

So we were looking to get a few new laptops for the IT team here, and after pricing some high end systems, we settled on Alienware. I must say kudos to the Alienware experience. These laptops are beautiful and well assembled. I will definitely consider buying an Alienware machine at home if I ever decide to stop building my own. My only gripe (and it's a small one) is that the backpacks we bought for the laptop are pretty snug with the 17" display models we got.  They fit... but it's pretty snug, an inch or two more space would probably be good for this model.

Anyways, I also have the opportunity with this new machine to dogfood Vista in our workplace, so I installed that on Friday and spent the weekend tweaking, configuring, and installing all my development tools. For my purposes, I have found that the cries of incompatibilities seem to be mostly hype.

• Team developer + SP1 + Resharper 2.5 worked just fine, although I had to run the installer for resharper as administrator to get it to finish proper.
• SQL management studio did require that I install the SP2 CTP, but it came up fine and I'm working effectively on it. 
• I also put Office 2007 since I've been using it since Beta 2 and frankly, I love it. The ribbon interface was jarring at first, but after a few hours of usage I am far more productive than I ever was in previous versions.

• For blogging, I have abandoned my old standby RSSBandit and installed SharpReader. I find SR to be a bit snappier in the response times.

• IIS 7.0 is probably the most jarring thing in Vista for a web developer. The interface is completely revamped and I'm struggling with it a bit, but I have a feeling it's going to end up, like Office, being more productive for me.

• There's an interesting issue in asp .net with impersonation and integrated mode, the error page seemed to suggest that impersonation is not the recommended run mode in the future, so I'm curious what guys on the ASP .NET team have to say about this.

• Team foundation server doesn't want to automagically configure an IIS virtual directory for my web application. Annoying, but not a show stopper.

• The instant search in the start menu is fan-freaking-tastic. You have to see it to believe it.

• The security pings whenever you edit control panel or run apps that need to be administrator really don't bother me. If it really does keep the OS more secure, I'm willing to live with it. I do hear some people being annoyed by it but I don't find it all that intrusive.

Anyways, point being, I'm up and running effectively. I know there's a lot of anti-microsoft vista bashing going on out there because it's fashionable, but the vast majority of it is hype.