Windows 7, a good platform for developers?

Question

I know about a similar question that has closed. But this is from the point of view of the developer.

I must say that my experience in software development (not including testing) was more painful in Vista than in XP. I wonder if you guys had a similar experience; and if so, does Windows 7 ease the pain?

I use Vista on my lappy and XP at work, both for development and for .NET (all kinds), some php, MSSQL and MySQL.

Install this as a wiki.

Answer 1

I can honestly say that Windows 7 is what Vista should always have been, and then some. If you are mainly a Linux platform developer, run it. If you are mainly a developer of the Windows platform, then Windows 7 is the place.

In any case, you can run another OS in a virtual machine.

Answer 2

Windows 7 is no better or worse than XP or Vista for development, at least as far as I can tell. And yes, Windows 7 is like gas @ 2.85 / gal, not 3.65 / gal Vista charged - that is, it seems better because it is, well, even if it is still small.

However, in my opinion, it is still "missing" by default. I am finishing the installation of cygwin / mingw / rxvt and other tools to make (windows in general) more suitable for my needs and expectations.

(Of course, any specific experience will be tied to what is or is not supported on versions of Windows, and any small changes that have been introduced.)

Answer 3

Here's one data point: most of my fellow MS developers seem to be working 7 these days (from time to time you get a question on the team’s mailing list, “who has a Vista window to play it back?” ~). A large number of people ran it as the main development desktop in RC and even a beta timeframe.

Most of the hurdles to Vista development, as I understand it, are with UAC. 7 gives a few fewer prompts, but for specific usage scenarios during development, this will probably not be different. Of course, you can always disable it, but you can also in Vista.

Some good parts are present if you regularly work with RDP - what you probably do if you have several mailboxes and don't like KVM, and / or run virtual machines on Hyper-V or Virtual PC. When you run RDP 7 to 7, you can get the full Aero Glass experience, with all effects included. Besides eyecandy, this can be useful when testing related functions.

What more ... PowerShell 2.0 is the ultimate out of the box. I find this a very convenient development tool, just as the shell is on Unix. Now you can get PSh 2.0 RC for XP or Vista, but not final (for now).

Answer 4

I think Vista and Win7 are a great development environment. In the end, this is what most of your end users will use so that you can see how your application interacts with the new platform features, while almost everything else about your application will look and feel the same as it was on XP.

Take UAC, for example. Yes, it can be annoying (it has improved significantly in Win7), but used correctly, it works well. It separates administrative privileges from regular user operations. If you are not actively developing in Vista or Win7, then the temptation should make the problem go away, telling people to turn off UAC or work as an administrator all the time. If you develop on this platform, it makes you come to a better solution.

Answer 5

Used by Vista for 3 years, full-time development in C ++ with mainly XP clients. No problems. We worked on the W7 RC 64bit for 2 months, the same machine, the same customers. No problems.

Better than XP, but mainly because I quickly assimilate with new features and do not resist change.

Answer 6

I find the following things worth considering so that Windows 7 is much better developed than XP:

• Many more drivers. Thus, you are happy to connect a headset to meetings, a new video card with support for 4 monitors, etc. Such things can sometimes be a pain in XP.
• More virtualization support - both applications (terminal services) and the OS. (Hyper-v)
• Improved support for multiple monitors and a new user interface to help with this - Aerosnap, gestures, etc.
• Log from dev files out of the box, .net runtime, powershell. All this which you can download and install on XP, but this is always when you need to reinstall machines.

Win 7 is not a problem in XP, definitely something if you have the money and equipment to upgrade, or if you get a new computer.

Answer 7

I do not think that the question can be answered “Yes” or “No”. The best answer: "It depends."

If Windows 7 solves some of the problems you encountered with other operating systems during development (or at least don't introduce new ones), then this is a good platform for you. On the other hand, if you have problems with this, stick to what you know works.

From my experience: Win 7 is good for me. About 3 months have passed since its installation and it works well - this does not bother me with my development. This is actually not the final version of W7, it is RTM.

Answer 8

This is very similar to Vista. The only problem I came across is the annoying UAC control, which makes shell extensions (like TortoiseSVN) useless unless you change the ownership of this folder. But I guess this is the same in Vista.

I am running MySQL, IIS, apache, TortoiseSVN and Visual Studio on Windows 7, and so far everything is working fine.

Answer 9

I personally switched to Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard as a development machine, and I find it much faster than Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Try it and you will see the difference. It can be configured very easily and quickly.

But since the question was about Windows 7, I used RTM Ultimate x64 as a development machine since August and did not find much difference compared to Vista Ultimate x32, which I used before. Of course, it looks more polished, but since I am primarily looking for speed, it did not really matter.

Answer 10

I have two development machines - one for a laptop and one for desktop computers - like for Windows 7. The desktop is much faster, not just to launch VS 2008, but the lag that I saw with ReSharper in some projects has completely disappeared.

Vista appeared on my laptop and I am running Windows 7 with the latest beta. With Vista, VS felt sluggish. Not only does it feel faster with W7, I run SQL Server Standard, a local SMTP server (SmarterMail) that hosts the Lucene.NET index and uses Velocity; everything for the project I'm working on now. And it is just as useful as when I only have VS on Vista on the same machine. I never expected that I could have everything that works on a laptop and can still be used, so my train performance for my commutation has increased dramatically.

One of my favorite W7 features is the preview bar in Windows Explorer. With it, I can select a C # file and look at the source without opening it in VS or a text editor. It is really convenient when I need to look at something in another project. I seriously do not have a single complaint about this OS - something that I could not say for a long time.

Answer 11

How does Visual Studio 2008 work on Windows 7? When I launched the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor , it was (ironically) the only software that was flagged as potentially problematic.

Answer 12

My boxing:

Windows 7 Professional, VS2008, VS2010, Netbeans with the addition of PHP, MSSQl, MySQL, PHP, Apache, IIS

Everything works perfectly

Answer 13

Linux is a good development platform, but it depends on your language..NET is best - Windows, Objective-C - Mac and C - Linux ...