Subdivided, by Michael J. Lu

Just before taking off for the holidays last week, I worked up the gall to repave my main machine and install Vista 5270, the December Community Technology Preview release. If there’s ever a good time to lose a couple of days rebuilding systems, the holidays are it.

Thus far, I’ve been impressed. This is the third time that I’ve tried out Vista, having installed the Beta 1 and PDC builds in the past. It’s the first time things are tolerable enough that I might keep it.  Although actions like startup are peppy, overall use is still sluggish in comparison to XP. However, this is quite normal. Microsoft development practices prioritize getting features to code complete (complete functionality, but not yet bulletproof) before tackling performance head-on. Among many reasons, it’s difficult to capture reliable performance metrics and across the entire application when the code is in a high state of flux. From friends working in the Windows division, I understand that the perf teams are already hard at work, and I fully expect that the next CTP (Feb?) will be improved in this regard.

I’ve been living on the edge on my main machine, having installed both Vista 5270 and Office 12 on the same box. This is a bit scary, as both products are in an early state. Installation of O12 Beta 1 reportedly failed with earlier builds of Vista. I’m happy to say that I installed without a hitch. I’ve experienced the occasional crash, but so did XP, so I’m happy to call it even.

Our shell team has been working hard and the shell is looking better than ever. The word “Start” is gone from the button and we’re now just left with the Windows jewel, which creatively bumps out the top of the task bar if it’s only one row high. Big fan. The Win-Tab Window Switcher has finally made its appearance. I’m excited-capabilities like this are a testament to the long needed improvements we’ve made in WinPF/Avalon over the old GDI architecture.

Things aren’t entirely rosy though. It seems like we answered the call of IT administrators and created a feature called User Account Protection (UAP). UAP adds an an extra confirmation screen to do, uhh, just about everything. A little window with some text and Permit/Deny buttons come up whenever a Control Panel applet is loaded, a downloaded file is being run, etc. While the idea was to add a confirmation layer before allowing the user to access system settings and perform possible malicious tasks, this dialog is overplayed, leading to annoyance, and punchy clicking of the “Permit” button without a glance at the contents.

This feature is part of the strategy that makes Windows usable without being an administrator. So far, it hasn’t made the grade. This is something I hope to see addressed before shipping, as there’s no way to currently turn it off and makes the initial system configuration process almost infuriating. I’m not the only one–Brandon LeBlanc of Longhorn Blogs has similar things to say.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. There’s a lot of refinement to do, but we’re treading in the right direction and I’ll continue to work with it and dogfooding more of our stuff (Hey Rick! Come check out my desktop!)

More screenshots and information:

ActiveWin | Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows

UPDATE: blink.nu has an article on how to disable User Account Protection.

Through the past four years, I’ve maintained a personal site at mikelu.org, where I’ve blogged and photoblogged on and off, typically about the latest happenings in my life. Lately, after all the traveling I’ve done and all the reading I do, I’ve had an itch to broaden my topics and start writing about things that impact my professional life.

I work at Microsoft. I recently met with Dare Obasanjo, a fellow Microsoftee and one of the well-known bloggers in the blogosphere. I asked him one question: does it pay to blog?

Let’s face it. Writing takes time. And if people aren’t reading then it’s time poorly spent.

Dare’s answer: Absolutely. And he cited all the ways its broadened his horizons and helped his career.

I’m sold.

I call this biog Subdivided because I think it’s an accurate term to describe our modern day global society. Concepts and methods once simple to us now have infinte branches of thought. Web 2.0 changes the whole paradigm of software. Religion books are at an all time high. BRIC countries are on the move. Foreign policy has never been so important. Unfantomable amounts of information are available just off the edge of every fingertip.

Specatular times we live in.