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Our current development environment at work is Windows XP pro. It is a fine operating system, but after using Vista and Windows 7 at home, I find myself wanting to use them at work where I spend majority of my time on a computer.

The problem lies in that Windows XP does the job, and there's 0 cost in moving forward as obviously its already in place and working, whereas Vista / Windows 7 would obviously cost money and time in the short term, but I believe in the long run we'll all be more productive in either a Vista or 7 environment.

So my question is how do I convince the decision makers to upgrade to at least Vista, I understand the service pack 1 rule, and am happy to accommodate that. (i.e. Vista now, 7 later).

Arguments can be from a .Net programmers perspective as we're all developers where I work.

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Why don't you have an MSDN subscription already? You don't use Visual Studio? –  Simon Buchan Feb 20 '09 at 9:09
Why do you want to switch yourself? –  ssg Feb 20 '09 at 9:15
Where does it say he doesnt have a MSDN subscription? –  Sakkle Feb 20 '09 at 10:02
We have an MSDN subscription, and yes of course we use Visual Studio :) –  keith Feb 20 '09 at 23:58
Answer updated as requested –  VonC Feb 21 '09 at 0:15
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closed as not constructive by Danny Beckett, Cairnarvon, Tikhon Jelvis, nvoigt, S.L. Barth May 24 '13 at 11:51


6 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

It all depends on the size of your enterprise.

We have more than 10000 workstations to manage, and that is the main reason we are still in XPSP2.

An OS comes with lots of group policy rules, which must be tested.
It also comes with custom software (anti-virus, limitation of the user's profile space, ...) which must be evaluated/upgraded.

In short, moving to a new OS is not a trivial task. The migration/deployment process alone takes month. And it is only one step. All the training of the support team must have been made beforehand.

Now, for a small company, the work involved is still not trivial.

  • licenses need to be updated
  • compatibility or upgrade of all softwares and drivers needs to be ascertained.
  • policies and security needs to be reviewed

All of this makes sense if the behavior of the program you are writing is not too different than the intended target.

If the vast majority of users will use your application on Xp, whereas you are developing on Vista or W7, you may end up detecting issue not one the development phase, but during the homologation or pre-production steps, which makes any fix that much harder to do.

In the end, It is about ROI. What productivity will you gain, and what advantage this new development platform will bring in term of time-to-market for your application ?

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For interests sake we are actually quite a small company –  keith Feb 20 '09 at 23:59
I guess it is difficult to quantify the ROI for our clients, majority of them are using XP x86 so it makes sense to code in that environment. I predict I'll gain productivity on the smaller GUI type things, its a nicer place to work in, but the current tool is doing the job. Good answer :) –  keith Feb 21 '09 at 2:26
Why does it matter what environment they'll run in? Code in the best environment, then test in an environment close to that of your customers. –  John Saunders Jun 29 '09 at 0:58
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The best reason I can think of for upgrading to to Vista is to utilize hardware better. I just upgraded my machine to quad core CPU and 8 GB ram. With Vista 64 bit everything just runs like a dream. Much less swapping and everything just seems to be going quite a bit faster.

With hardware prices as they are, there is really no reason to struggle with less memory. Of course your IT department may look at it differently, but from a developer's point of view a fast machine with lots of memory is the way to go.

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You can't be serious about switching to Vista "to utilize hardware better" can you?? that would be the first reason not to. XP 64bit will use 8GB just fine. My guess is that they're not using more than 2 or 3GB in the first place, but anyway. Waiting for Windows 7 makes a lot of sense. –  nachik Feb 20 '09 at 9:01
Downvoting because you don't agree with the Vista choice, that's not so nice... Vista negativity is mostly just bad press and initial lack of driver support. XP 64bit has more driver issues than Vista 64bit, so I would agree, when you've got a lot of ram, use Vista 64bit. +1 to cancel the downvote. –  Davy Landman Feb 20 '09 at 9:36
+1 to negate unfair downvote. Utilizing hardware or not, in my experiense Vista runs smoother and faster on the same hardware. Whatever the reason for this (memory or not) might be I would call it better use of hardware. –  Sakkle Feb 20 '09 at 9:37
@nachik - Everything runs very nicely on my Vista 64 bit and the OP was asking for input on how to convince management to switch to Vista/Windows 7, so I take it that he is happy with whatever shortcomings Vista may have. –  Brian Rasmussen Feb 20 '09 at 9:46
I honestly don't see any logic in adding 64 bit to the question. Apples to oranges. But I'm removing my -1 since I think it's a bad idea to rush a move to Vista when Windows 7 looks so much better and it's almost there. I take it my advice won't help him and retreat. –  nachik Feb 20 '09 at 18:38
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I'm definitely going to be accused of FUD slinging for this, but Vista? Seriously?

This is contrary to most peoples experience I think, it's dubious (1,2,3,4) if your productivity will go up at all. There's a core of developers who think the upgrade is in the other direction or can be better achieved with XP addons, and then there's pessimistic speculation that you should buy the licences only. Not to pretend that pro opinions don't exist.

For the cost (and don't forget there's going to be hardware upgrades and missing drivers) there's little apparent gain (the big USP is supposed to be security which no company should ever let the OS handle anyway). If you were talking about servers 2k3 -> 2k8 that would be a much more reasonable sell, but as far as I can see the best reason to push to vista is because eventually you'll have to.

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The security issue is valid. Any company that takes security even remotely seriously will have multiple layers of protection and the robustness and built in security of the OS is going to be play a role in this, arguably, not the most important one but overlooking it alltogether would be a mistake. –  Sakkle Feb 20 '09 at 9:35
I agree about layering, but a chunk of that claim is actually based on IE7 which is one thing for home users, but kind of moot for a dev. The way they're selling it is a false security, nevermind that it's a dubious claim compared to !MS OSs. –  annakata Feb 20 '09 at 9:53
I agree to some extent however you need to remeber that the original poster was asking for views from a .NET standpoint. Show me the developer that could be effective in .NET programming in on a non MS platform. If you're stuck with MS everything else is really not interesting in this context. –  Sakkle Feb 20 '09 at 10:00
(shhh don't wake the mono devs!) It's true enough, but you'll note my answer is just about XP vs Vista. –  annakata Feb 20 '09 at 10:59
If you'd have made this argument back when Vista first came out I'd agree with you, but use it now. It is actually quite a mature product! Not to mention the articles you reference are mostly from 2006 to 2008. –  keith Feb 21 '09 at 0:03
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We've used the following argument to run the latest Office and IE versions:

Our applications need to be prepared for the next version, so if the whole company makes the switch, we know our applications work in the new versions, and we have experience solving certain compatibility problems.

Of course it could be argued that this are what VM's are for, but we've chosen the other way around, use VM's to test for older versions.

Our company has > 6000 computers, so we offered to not get corporate support on the software we've upgraded ourself.

We'd also liked upgrading our OS, but the Novell server version has no compatible Vista client.

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Because Jon Skeet uses Vista ;-)

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I'm with annakata here, seriously? Vista for development?

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Yeh you used it recently? :D –  keith Feb 21 '09 at 1:11
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