Vista

I finally upgraded my primary development PC. I decided to get the most expandable PC that would last me quite a while, so I opted for a Dell XPS. The only problem with XPS is that they only come with Vista. That's fine I thought, I could use a Vista system to test with... this is the future of Windows.

Overall Vista isn't as bad as people have made out. It is EXTREMELY frustrating to use out of the box, for those that are long time Windows Power Users. Just getting it to find a WinXP share on the network from my old PC took forever. Everyone whines about the parade of warnings, but with one click UAC is easily turned off.

The biggest problem I had with Vista is that Visual Studio 2003 (my primary dev environment) does not run on Vista. I think I had heard this, but didn't remember. So this weekend was spent upgrading to 2005 (which I preferred as a dev environment anyway), and changing my installers to check for .NET 2.0. I think .NET 2.0 now is at least as installed as .NET 1.1 was when I started ChimSoft, so I'm reasonably comfortable requiring it. Also 2.0 comes pre-installed with Vista.

So my planned 1.1 release is a little delayed, but I hope to have it out by the end of the week. It's the first release that had some "tricky" problems to solve.

I've also been playing with AdWords, and see why people obsess about this so much. Is it better to have 11% CTR on a cheap keyword, or 3% CTR on an expensive keyword? I'm trying to find the right balance of clicks to money spent, with conversions being the major factor.