Hurray! The product we have been developing for one of our customers successfully passed Microsoft’s “Certified for Windows Vista” logo testing (in fact we already have two applications passed it by this time). Since the product itself doesn’t require deep interaction with the system, we expected that preparing it for the submission would be a piece of cake but it wasn’t that simple. Actually it wasn’t simple at all. It took 3 weeks and two working weekends to put it together and submit for testing with confidence.

We started by getting Vista iso from MSDN downloads and installing it under VMWare Server. We used VMWare to have “physical” (as opposed to Remote Desktop) access to that system from different workplaces. That was the simple part yet we found that it won’t install from iso directly but rather needs to be burned on real DVD (the iso is 2.5 Gb) and installed from there. It is reported that the reason is VMWare’s bug causing problems handling large iso images. Anyways, we get it installed and working (oh by the way it’s still working exactly on the same processor, which fed this web-page to you — both Linux, running this webserver and our test Windows Vista are running under VMWare on the same physical server — isn’t it amazing?)
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Microsoft’s User Experience team did an excellent job putting together Vista User Experience Guidelines. It’s very good, detailed and actually has broader application than just Vista. I wish every software developer / designer read it and at least tried as hard as possible to adhere to rules and suggestions presented there.

Here are some of my favorite’s rules from the guidelines:

“Don’t spend time rebuilding standard UI components; use that time instead to innovate in meaningful ways based on your core competencies and understanding of your customer needs.”

It makes sense although the reality is that over the next five years Windows XP and older systems will still represent significant market share so most developers won’t be comfortable abandoning skins just because on Vista standard controls look good enough.
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Well… it was for some minutes. Today when I logged in to MSDN subscribers website I immediately saw a huge banner inviting to download the final build of Vista now. I followed the link to 2,5 Gbytes ISO image but download never started. Few minutes later the banner, the announcement, and entire Windows Vista item in Operating Systems node of downloads were all gone. The only thing remaining is this blog post.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who tried to get that ISO image today.