Windows Vista Developer PC

On my laptop I have a dual boot with Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista Ultimate. The last couple of weeks I'm trying to move all my Visual Studio 2005 development solutions from the Windows Server 2003 OS to the Windows Vista OS. I can say that the move is almost complete but it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it was and some features are still not fully active.

An overview :

• Visual Studio 2005 is installed with the service pack for Windows Vista. Don't forget to always run Visual Studio as an administrator if you want to be able to do all your developer stuff as before! The connection from Visual Studio towards a Team Foundation Server works perfectly.
• IIS 7.0 on Vista Ultimate is disabled by default and you should carefully examine which (sub-)features you need to enable for your applications : application development features, security features, ...
• Installing SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition on Vista was the hardest part for me. I had to redo it a couple of times because of problems with the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition that was already installed with the Visual Studio 2005 installation. I had to do the uninstall of SQL Server 2005 manually and I could only re-install it with a new named instance of a SQL Server. There is a Service Pack for installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista but you first have to get the normal version installed. Tough job!
• One of my solutions makes use of transactions in .NET 2.0 and I had to enable the Network Distributed Transaction Coordinator Access on Vista. You can change those DTC settings in the Component Services (a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console). Before that I was always getting MSDTC on server x is unavailable. This is something you probably have to do on other operating systems as well because this feature isn't always enabled by default, but I thought that it still deserves a place in my list here.

Still to do :

• Examine how to get my local SMTP server up-and-running. I'm only able to store the sent mail in a pickup directory, but I still can't get it sent through my localhost. There is no trace anymore of a mailroot folder in the inetpub directory ...
• The SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition is finally installed and working, but I still have to look at Reporting Services, Integration Services, ... These features are still to be installed and tested!