To find out how Vista is being approached in the trenches, we invited six InformationWeek.com readers to a week-long roundtable discussion. Participants included:

• Dennis Barr, Mgr, Information Technology of the Larkin Group Inc.
• Marc Chester, Vice President, Business Development for Data Reduction Systems
• Bill Flanagan, an independent consultant in IT and particularly networking.
• David Gray, Vice President for Information Technology & CIO and CEO, UMassOnline for the University of Massachusetts
• Chris Rutkowski, IT Manager for Reliant Behavioral Health
• Wayne Wengert, a retired programmer/IT specialist

In the first segment, the participants introduced themselves and offered their initial opinions about Microsoft's new OS. In the second, the participants discussed the inevitability of Vista as the standard for personal computing and whether users will accept alternatives to Windows. In this, the third of five segments, they go into detail about how developers can take advantage of Vista, and examine problems with specific apps and processes.

Wayne Wengert: I hope Microsoft puts more effort into providing answers and working tools for developers. If it is too difficult to build new applications (desktop or Web) everyone loses. Right now, I am still unable to build and deploy applications built in Vista.

There are also several "unknowns" when you move to Vista as the development platform and there needs to be definitive answers available if they want new applications from the development community. For example, in Win2000 and WinXP there are certain services that the developer knows are there or can be added as part of the install such as MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components - the components to read/write files) and ADOX (components to interface to databases). From my limited attempts to build solutions in Vista it is not clear to me exactly what I can depend upon being there? This needs clarification.

		The Windows Vista Roundtable
		•   Part 1: First Impressions •   Part 2: The Inevitability Of Vista •   Part 3: Vista For Developers •   Part 4: Is Vista A "Wow!"? •   Part 5: Final Thoughts
		•  Join The Discussion

Chris Rutkowski: If I understand correctly, apps built in XP (using VS 2005 and VB) run on Vista but apps built on Vista don't run on XP (and earlier). The only time I've seen the latter issue is when the app isn't set to use the appropriate version of .NET 1.x or 2.x as appropriate rather than Vista's default 3.x.

Having said that, getting my developers to migrate to Vista is at the bottom of my priority list. Getting them to stop grousing about how slow everything is in high horsepower systems running XP SP2 with every possible service disabled was hard enough. Microsoft would probably win points by shipping a stripped-down minimalist version of Vista just for developers!

Dennis Barr: Wow -- what a concept! Vista Developer... What would a version like this include? What would be left out? You know, from a performance standpoint, I might even want something like that for CAD users. There's too much junk in the typical XP installation now, too much that's distracting from a pure productivity perspective. What might a Vista CAD Productivity version look like? Anyone have some ideas?

Do we really need Media Player 11? Or Windows Mail? Or a lot of the other stuff that's being included?

Chris Rutkowski: Thinking about it, unless Microsoft does craft a "developer's edition," since Longhorn doesn't provide much in the way of gewgaws to amuse the masses, it may end up the developer's OS of choice. Pricy, but that's what MSDN licenses are for, isn't it?

Marc Chester: Stripping the version down for development is always a good thing. I am currently using Vista Business edition and it seems that there are a fair number of applications that are aimed to the home user. Your points regarding mail and calendar are excellent examples of this. These are pieces that are mostly useless, especially in an MS Office environment. Another example of MS fluff us is the contacts gadget. This is a great concept but worthless considering that I can't link this to my Outlook contacts. Makes one wonder who the focus groups were during the development stage of this OS.

Wayne Wengert: There are problems installing and running apps built in XP on Vista. For example, if the app uses ADOX, the installation package has to be modified for Vista. Also, if you use any add-ins (as most developers do) some of those are not yet available for Vista. Also, if the app uses certain features of a driver (for example, some special graphic calls) and that driver is still not really Vista ready - you'll have problems.

My big frustration at the moment is with problems in basic VS2005 builds. Until I can get reliable builds, with all features, I can't use Vista for development. It is hard to get solid answers -- I expect some of this will improve once we get past the initial flood of queries MS has to deal with.