It's great to see that the new SuperFetch feature of the Vista memory manager is not only enabled in build 5270, but is also surprisingly easy to use. When you plug in a suitable USB storage device, there's a new entry in the familiar AutoPlay choices window (screenshot below). I have yet to see if it actually speeds things up at all.

I'm really excited about the new Windows graphics subsystem, the Windows Presentation Foundation (insert WPF vs. Avalon joke here). I am teaching myself the new API by working on a sample application which is a simple card game. Maybe I'll post some screenshots and sample code here soon. Anyways, the ease of declaring an impressive yet flexible UI using XAML is surprising. Check out this great article on the Top 10 UI Development Breakthroughs made possible by the WPF.

My apologies for the lack of new posts lately. And you may be wondering why so few of them are even indirectly Vista-related. When I started this blog I envisioned having a reasonably usable Vista+WinFX development machine within weeks, with which to experiment as well as blog about. Unfortunately, the past few Vista builds have either been incompatible or unreliable with my hardware setup (SATA RAID Matrix controller - don't ask!), or had no supported companion release of the WinFX SDK.

Both of those hindrances are now removed. The recent release of the Windows Vista December CTP (build 5270) has been reported to be quite stable, and has a matching set of development tools, at last! And my newly rebuilt Vista machine consists of a dual-core Pentium D processor, 2GB of RAM, and 400GB of storage (using a disk controller that's actually supported!). As soon as I get the build installed and play around with it a bit, I'll post about my first impressions. Stay tuned!