My first install of Vista was on a Virtual PC. Nice but my main problem was that it's sluggish and unresponsive. Even if it has a 2.Ghz Hyperthreaded CPU and a full gigabyte of RAM at its disposal. The cause of that, as discussed here on Joel on Software is Virtual PC's graphics driver. Vista relies on DX and Virtual PC's emulated S3 doesn't support that. I decided to give Longhorn another spin on my Tablet PC. Not virtual but as a dual boot so it could work with some real hardware. You need an empty NTFS partition to install Vista and my tablet comes with FAT32. I'm not going to tell you the full story how I got two NTFS partitions (one to keep XP, one for Vista), it's something I would like to forget as soon as possible. But I do want to thank my neighbour for salvaging things when it had really gone bad. After that installing Vista itself was no big problem, it just takes patience. I got the network (both fixed and wireless) up and running with the XP drivers.
Vista running directly on the Tablet hardware behaves very well. Despite the machine's moderate specs (1 Ghz CPU and 512Mb's of RAM) it is responsive and a pleasure to work with. The good thing is that Vista does recognize the tablet pen straight out of the box. It is a pointer and click-and hold works fine. After installing the driver the logon button (which is by definition an equivalent of pressing ctrl-alt-del) did exactly what it's supposed to do. But the tablet input panel (TIP) is not a part of the beta; it is available to registered beta testers. I'm trying to get my hands on it.
There are no tablet applications like Windows journal and the like included yet. To see what does work I set up development tools. Installing the VS 2005 beta had a small problem with MsXML. Dave Glover had several solutions at hand. The first one, to install the msxml6.msi by hand before installing VS worked like a charm. To start with the classical way of developing tablet apps the Tablet PC SDK came next. As a first test I took my sample on handwriting recognition. Which, after some small modifications, built fine. Running it shows the Tablet parts missing in Vista:
Scribbling with the pen works, but there are no handwriting recognizers installed. Trying my gesture recognizer sample showed that also the gesture recognizer isn't part of Vista. But using the SDK is not really the way to go for Vista Tablet development. The API's have become part of the Avalon Presentation layer. Here comes XAML ! More on that later.
The Beta 1 release Vista did also inspire several bloggers. To name the most interesting one's for developers :
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