Advantage of running Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 instead of Windows XP

Question

Is there any advantage of running Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 instead of Windows XP?

Answer 1

First, Windows 7 has goodies to offer you. I am more productive on Windows 7. And Visual Studio 2010 (unlike 2008 and earlier) is Windows 7 aware. I get nice jumplists to make it easier to get to recent projects, for example. It also makes it possible to install Visual Studio extensions like the one I blogged that adds a compiler progress bar as an overlay on your taskbar icon, so you can minimize VS during a slow build and know how it's doing.

Second, moving your prime machine to 7 is likely to help your users. Many developers have been caught off balance the first time their application is deployed to a machine on which they are not an admin. Developing on Windows 7 is one way to be sure your application works with UAC, and works on an XP machine being run by a non-admin (if you ever meet one.) Getting in the habit of using Windows 7 features yourself will encourage you to hook them into your application. Staying on XP yourself increases the tendency that you will deliver an XP application people can kinda sorta mostly use on Windows 7, rather than a Windows 7 application.

Answer 2

Consider the difference between WPF on XP and Windows Vista (Aero), as one of the arguments. Beyond that, insert all generic improvements in Windows for the last decade, and so on...

Edit: To clarify, Visual Studio 2010 uses WPF, so you get a much faster and stable IDE by using it on Vista/Windows 7.

Answer 3

As a general rule, I think it's better to develop on your target platform. So if you develop for Windows 7, develop on Win7. If you develop for XP, I would suggest developing on XP.

Everything else is a matter of taste. Yes, there are many developers who love Win7 and can't imagine going back to the ancient XP. On the other hand, there are still quite a few folks around who consider XP to be the more mature Windows, and won't consider switching before Win7 SP2 is out.

Take your pick...

Answer 4

I guess it also depends on what is your target, if you do application development (read WPF/Windows Forms) then, like it has already been said, it will need to be tested on multiple platforms so doesn't make much difference. However, if you are doing web application development then you should target the specific IIS version you are going to deploy to. This has become easier with the launch of IIS Express, however if targeting IIS 7.5 on Windows 2008 R2 then run Windows 7 :-)

In my experience, Windows 2008 R2 running as a workstation is pretty good, but has lack of support for some DVD-RW drives and graphics cards can be a little unstable so stick with Windows 7 :-)

I hope this helps :-)