NOTE
Paul is a fellow Readifiarian who, in a David and Goliath repeat, recently took on the might of the DPE team with a challenge to put up or shut up with a list of valid reasons for moving to WPF.

How long have you been running Vista for on your desktop (honestly)?
I installed it about 5 hours ago, and used it for about 2 hours.

Tell me about a Vista feature have you discovered recently.
None of it works! Actually, I finally got around to doing a little fooling with Monad (sorry – Windows PowerShell), and I have to say it’s a really cool invention. I know guys who love to automate things (Mitch) are going to love the power of MSH.

Are you going to attend any of the upcoming Vista events?
I’d love to, it all depends on which ones I can get to. I noticed there’s 3 days of Vista training being offered by Microsoft for only a couple of hundred dollars (Frank was advertising it), and I’d love to attend that. Of course there’s always TechEd, and I’ll be making an appearance at all the local user groups. I haven’t noticed many other Vista events on, but if there are and I can get to them I’d love to go.

Any interesting Vista stories to tell?  
Let me use it for a couple more hours and I’ll get back to you…

So as somebody who isn’t heavily using Vista right now, are you looking forward to it?  What concerns if any do you have about Vista and do you see it as fulfilling the hype that we are getting about it?  
I’m definitely looking forward to it. Right now the only reason I’m not using it is because it won’t let me install the drivers for my laptop on it, so the mouse and video card are performing slowly which really takes away the experience.

I have no concerns about Vista at all. I’ve had a lot of trust in Microsoft since .NET and all the new stuff they’ve been pumping out, so I think they’ll live up to the hype.

WCF, WF and WPF are all really great technologies, my only concern is it’ll be years until we’re actually using them in production! I’m also concerned that WPF doesn’t seem to have many of the “common” controls (a DataGridView, a DateTimePicker). While I’m sure that in time third parties and Microsoft will fill the gap, it’s going to slow down the adoption of WPF in the early stages.

I guess the only other thing that seems a bit confusing is the 84 (ok, maybe 9?) different flavours of Vista we’ll be seeing. If this keeps going, we’ll end up like the Linux camp – “What distro should I get?”

One thing I’d love to see more from Microsoft is real applications built using the new upcoming technologies. It’s all well and good to have some textboxes that rotate while we all laugh at how useful banks are going to find it, but I think that’s just reinforcing the view that many developers now hold – WPF is a toy and has no commercial value. The examples I’ve seen of WCF and WF aren’t much better. I’d really love to see a real app, even a small one, using these tools so developers can get an understanding of why we’re supposed to be so excited.