In-Depth

Virtual Vista Versions Revealed

Microsoft will offer free trials of Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2005.

Want to toy around with Windows Vista or Vista with Visual Studio 2005 but not pay for them? Microsoft is making it possible to take a 30-day test drive of either product through the magic of virtualization.

David Kim, associate product manager on the Windows Client team, mentioned on the Vista blog that the company has built virtual images of a Windows Vista Enterprise Edition and Windows Vista with Visual Studio 2005. All that's needed to run them is a virtual machine on a PC, something like Microsoft's version, Virtual PC 2007 or VMware. Once loaded, the products will behave like normal applications — for the 30-day period.

Vista Enterprise is the top-level version of the OS, meant for use in large environments. Although Microsoft has touted Vista's strong adoption in the market, there has been a lot of questioning of its claims. Making it available as a virtual image could spur sales — assuming, of course, the experience is positive.

Developers may be excited by the Vista with VS 2005 option. Currently, Microsoft supports Vista for three Microsoft development products: Visual Basic 6.0, Visual FoxPro 9.0 and VS 2005, but only with the Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista. Versions of VS 2003 and earlier aren't supported by Microsoft. Earlier development products may work with Vista, Microsoft said, but it won't support them.

The reason? According to Microsoft, "Visual Studio 2003 or earlier would require many changes that make that experience worse." The virtualized products can be found here.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Creating Reactive Applications in .NET

    In modern applications, data is being retrieved in asynchronous, real-time streams, as traditional pull requests where the clients asks for data from the server are becoming a thing of the past.

  • AI for GitHub Collaboration? Maybe Not So Much

    No doubt GitHub Copilot has been a boon for developers, but AI might not be the best tool for collaboration, according to developers weighing in on a recent social media post from the GitHub team.

  • Visual Studio 2022 Getting VS Code 'Command Palette' Equivalent

    As any Visual Studio Code user knows, the editor's command palette is a powerful tool for getting things done quickly, without having to navigate through menus and dialogs. Now, we learn how an equivalent is coming for Microsoft's flagship Visual Studio IDE, invoked by the same familiar Ctrl+Shift+P keyboard shortcut.

  • .NET 9 Preview 3: 'I've Been Waiting 9 Years for This API!'

    Microsoft's third preview of .NET 9 sees a lot of minor tweaks and fixes with no earth-shaking new functionality, but little things can be important to individual developers.

  • Data Anomaly Detection Using a Neural Autoencoder with C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research tackles the process of examining a set of source data to find data items that are different in some way from the majority of the source items.

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube