Has anyone ran into any issues developing on Windows 7?

Question

I want to trial Windows 7 but wondered if anyone who has done so already ran into any issues specifically related to development?

i.e. problems with VS2008, SQL Management Studio and SQL Server, MySQL, PHP etc. etc.

Examples from XP -> Vista: in Vista there was a sudden loss of an SMTP server. And there were initially (if I remember correctly) issues with VS2005 with I seem to remember a patch coming out later to remedy.

EDIT: or on the contrary any big advantages or benefits to developing on Windows 7!

Answer 1

My advice would be to not develop on Windows 7. Note that I don't mean you shouldn't target it as a platform, just that you should be doing your development on a stable platform.

I personally won't trust a new release of Windows (or Linux for that matter) until it's been in the wild as a proper product (not release candidate) for many months. For Windows, I tend to wait until the first real service pack plus a month for all the nigglies to be fixed.

For Linux, I'm still using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, not 8.1, and certainly not the 9 alphas.

Test machines are another matter, you should always have one at the "latest and greatest" level for testing, but I consider the development machine of prime importance, needing a stable platform.

Answer 2

The only issue I've encountered so far involves compiling older vanilla C programs with Visual C++. You're usually presented with an error like so:

mt.exe : general error c101008d: Failed to write the updated manifest to the resource of file ".\Release\SomeProgram.exe". The binary is not a valid Windows image.

You have to add an empty resource file to the solution.

More on the issue here.

Answer 3

I been using windows 7 for a while now. I been using VS2008, netbeans, tomcat, sql manager studio, mysql etc...

And i actually find it more stable and faster then windows vista.

Answer 4

There aren't many advantages to developing on Windows 7 before it's released. Most development features are a function of the IDE, not the OS. So, you might want to consider instead if you should be developing on Visual Studio 2010 instead of VS2008. Instead, you're more likely to have compatibility issues, although for the most part, Windows 7 is much more compatible with existing software than Vista was when it was in beta.

There could be one advantage to developing for Windows 7 before it's released -- you have a head start in taking advantage of features that competitors haven't yet, giving you an advantage in the market. That's the theory at least. That assumes you're going to develop something that uses a feature only available in Windows 7. That assumes you wouldn't be better off with the larger number of sales you'd get by developing something that works on existing platforms.

Answer 5

I've never gotten any of the new audio stack examples working; thus this question. API works, documentation is... a bit lacking at the moment; sure to be fixed by RTM.

Other than that, Windows 7 has been faster than and just as stable as Vista (2 crashes from RTM, 0 crashes after SP1) was for me. Truly, you should be developing on Vista and testing on Windows 7 RC as a general practice with respect to pre-release operating systems; but I think we'll get away with it just fine in this particular case.

Answer 6

No problems from my end yet, been working on a c# app with visual studio 2008 x64, and php web apps with dreamweaver cs3 and netbeans.

Windows7 seems to be just vista with more bells and wistles and a bit more responsive, not to sure if to much really change "under the hood" so to speak. But I have nothing to back that statement up with...

Answer 7

I've been using Win7 for a couple of months now and never had a problem. I went straight from XP to 7 and the only problems I faced were related to configuring SourceGear Vault to work with IIS7...other than that,it's been all good.

I use VS 2005, VS 2008, SQL Server 2005, Infragistics NetAdvantage, and a couple of third party components.

Although I haven't seen any advantages for the development side of the applications, I'd recommend you to upgrade to Win7 only for the better feel of a complete OS. I mean XP was good, but I really dig Win7.