.Net development on vista or XP

Question

I am wondering if it is better to develop .Net 2010 web application on XP as compare to Vista? I have developed many .Net applications on XP without any problem and personaly like XP over vista. Now i have started a new job and we are all mainly using Vista Ultimate 32 bit.

Are there any known issues with vista for VS2010 development?

Application will be published on Window Server 2003 or 2008 so my main concern is developing and running application localy.

Also, is Visual Source Safe 6.0 Compatiable with Vista?

Answer 1

You'll have some difficulty since XP is only 32 bit (unless you've got the 64-bit edition which is a little flakey re: drivers).

Also, certain features like XNA Game Studio, Windows Phone 7 development, DirectX 11, etc... just aren't supported on an XP development environment.

You may also hit issues with regards to integrating with the Azure cloud platform as it has some dependencies that don't work fully on XP.

That said, if you're only going for a simple Winforms/Console app/ASP.Net site, you probably won't ever notice the difference

Oh and .Net 4.5 isn't supported on XP

As an aside, please DO NOT USE visual source safe - it's truly awful. It doesn't guarantee consistency, has no concept of branching and merging, doesn't allow multiple users to work on the same files and is generally unreliable (not to mention the fact that it relies on every client playing nicely and a single malicious user can drop the entire data store since it's really just a windows share with some files, not an actual server). See this article: Visual SourceSafe Version Control: Unsafe at any Speed? for more details.

You should use TFS or an open source alternative (I've also played with SVN and used AnkhSVN to integrate into VS - Not perfect but pretty good). If you want to use TFS but don't have the servers/experience to set up a server yourself, There's a (currently free) beta being run by microsoft at tfspreview.com which integrates right into VS 2010 SP1 and later and provides all the same functionality as well as a whole slew of other features like bug/workitem tracking, analytics, etc...