Windows Rocks???

Normally, I would say that I prefer anything *nix to Microsoft. However, I think I may be equally pleased with Windows 7 as I am with *nix...much to my own surprise!

I had played with the 7 beta when it was first made available, but only enough to do a clean install and look around the GUI. I had quickly decided it looked too much like Vista (which I don't mind so much now) and went back to other tasks. This may have been a mistake.

This last weekend, I decided to re-build one of my boxes in order to have a dedicated development and analysis box. My other dev environment had become too congested as I was admittedly lazy and used it for many other non-dev tasks.

I had a list of software I just had to have, for both personal preference and for school requirements. The major items were:
- SQL Server 2008
- Oracle 11g
- Visual Studio 2008 Pro
- Eclipse (with multiple platforms and tools)
- Android SDK
- NetBeans 6.8
- Visio 2007
- Cisco VPN client
- IIS 7
- UDDI SDK
- Tomcat 6

I was reluctant to slap all of this onto Windows 7 Pro. However, the box I was using was sold to me by Dell with Vista, and an AMD processor later found not to support Vista, and some of the drivers I needed for the box were not compatible with XP Pro. Thus, my decision to try to use Windows 7 Pro.

Windows 7 Pro installed clean AND faster than half of the software listed above. The total time to install 7, the software above, some minor other software, and ALL patches was about six hours (including beer breaks!). I was able to verify that IIS and Tomcat 6 are playing well together, I easily tested my dev tools by slapping together some quick code, and my DB's are accessible, secure, and working well!!!

Bottom line: as much as I love *nix, Windows 7 Pro (So far) ROCKS!!! The only pain I had was that I had to slap on an older .Net Framework in order to register the Microsoft.Uddi.dll.