Now that Windows Vista is RTM, I have bought a Core 2 Duo system, installed Vista, and am converting my development environment over to Vista. The performance of my Windows XP box has significantly degraded over the past year despite aggressive efforts at removing unnecessary processes. With SuperFetch and ReadyBoost, I'm hoping to see a dramatic improvement in Vista.
Up until now all of our C++ development has been in Visual C++ 6.0 (VC6) because we needed compatibility with Windows 95. Visual Studio 97 (which includes VC6) installed fine on Vista, but Service Pack 6 did not. Turns out that VC6 has reached "end of life" and it won't be supported on Vista. OTOH, VB6 *is* officially supported on Vista, but since no one has figured out how to install SP6 on the RTM, it remains to be seen how this can be made to work.
Since VC6 is now ten years old, I've decided to convert our applications to Visual Studio 2005. I do this with some reluctance because VS2005 had been an absolute pig on a P4 2.4 GHz with 1GB of RAM. Also, our applications use some VC6 features that will need to be reworked for VS2005, such as try { } catch (...) {}. This catch block on VC6 would catch access violations, but this functionality was deemed to be non-standard and was removed. It's now necessary to put in explicit Win32 structured exception handling support.
The good news is that last year I proactively fixed some of the most egregious problems, such as the scope of variables in for loops.
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