It's also available to software developers by subscribing to MSDN, the Microsoft Developer's Network, so they can tweak their code to be ready in time for the launch. I'm surprised PG is not a member of MSDN, as I have a friend that works for a niche company that markets receipt printers/kiosk printers, and they subscribe to MSDN for the purposes of driver development. He's a firmware engineer there and designs their printer firmware.[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
I'm a MSDN Universal (since 1997) subscriber - I can assure you that I or any other MSDN subscriber does *not* have access to Vista RTM as of today (Nov 16th).
The only souls with that access are system manufacturers and developers/hardware vendors renting space at Microsoft's Redmond and Bellevue, WA facilties dedicated for this purpose, and of course select meber of the press.
All that being said - the question of software compatibility is a fair question, but beyond the vendor's assurance that Vista will be supported, any further questions are unwarranted. To clarify this - I also have customers calling regarding Vista support, to which I happily respond, "No problem - we will support you". If my customer chooses to follow up with hypothetical questions about issues they may or may have in the future, I'll, as diplomatically as possible, tell them to stop wasting my and their time, and ask if they have any
existing support issues we can help them with.
There *are* well documented work arounds to help support legacy and/or unsupported applications that for some reason or another, require administrative access to either system files or protected areas of the Windows registry. One of the simplest can be found in Vista's own help documentation which I found as early as RC1:
To mark an application to always require a full administrator access token:
Right click the application file, select
Properties then click the compatibility tab. Under
Privilege Level, select the
Run this program as an administrator check box, and then click
OK.
This works fine for a couple of plug-ins I rely on including a scanner add-in. Note: I'm talking in this case about Vista RC2.
More info can be found at:
[a href=\"http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/01/announcing-the-windows-vista-application-compatibility-factory.aspx]http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsv...ty-factory.aspx[/url]
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...ty/default.mspxFinally, Andrew: Vista RC2 runs like a champ on a dual-core mac my partner has using bootcamp. It also runs great in VMware and Ms's beta Virtual PC 2007. Now if we could only get Mac OSX running in a VM . . .