My adventure with Windows Vista began with multiple attempts to install the operating system itself on various computers in my possession. First, I had hoped to install it as an upgrade for Windows XP that is running on my actual work computer. I wouldn't ordinarily recommend this, but I've been given a real desktop computer to use at my current client, so my laptop has only been getting used for e-mail for a while now, anyhow.

As it turned out, Beta 1 of Vista does not support Upgrade installations, so I soon realized I would have to find a place where I could do a fresh installation. This led me to try installing on Virtual PC - a difficult proposition, indeed. Specifically, I received a warning during initial installation that there wasn't enough room on my virtual hard disk. Fortunately I tried restarting my Virtual PC and trying it again, because that alone seemed to resolve the issue.

After a fairly lengthy installation process I finally had Vista up and running under Virtual PC. Unfortunately, the colors on the desktop were very messed up. In many cases, the colors were confused to the point that they made the various pieces of text illegible. I knew immediately that this must have something to do with Vista's inability to support Virtual PC's virtualized video drivers at this point in its development. It occurred to me that I might hunt around for some real video drivers that might work better, but I knew that I'd just be guessing and didn't relish the thought of spending my time on a wild goose chase.

Therefore I gave up for a while at this point. Then, thankfully, an answer to my dilemma dropped out of the sky. Microsoft made a set of Virtual PC extensions available to MVP's that resolved the video display and made it clear as a bell. I wish I could tell the rest of you how to get a similar fix for this problem, but a brief search of the Web indicates that nothing has yet been made public on this front.

Once I had Vista in a usable state under Virtual PC, I began by playing around a bit with the user interface. The first thing one observes is that the Start menu in Vista has a tendency to pop up new menus in a way that covers previous menus, rather than expanding to the right. I'm not entirely sure how much I like this, but I'm going to wait until I've had more experience with it before I make any decisions.

After my initial explorations of the Vista Explorer, I decided to get started finding out how one is supposed to develop applications for this new version of the Windows operating system. Right on the desktop there is a shortcut to "Learn More about Avalon and Indigo." The fact that the names in the OS are still the codenames, rather than the official Vista-era names (Windows Presentation Foundation for Avalon and Windows Communication Foundation for Indigo) surprised me. I clicked on the link and it told me to install the WinFX components (Indigo and Avalon) from the Support directory on the Vista installation media. It surprised me that this wasn't indicated, but this same document promised that it would be in future releases - so Microsoft appears to be on the right path here, at least.

Installation of the WinFX Beta 1 components went very smoothly due to choosing all of the defaults. It took about 10 minutes on a 1.3 GHz laptop with 1 Gig of RAM, but I imagine it would go much faster on a real PC.

Whenever I install an SDK, I like to go into the Windows Start menu and find out what it has put on my computer. After this installation, there wasn't anything new in the Start menu, so I went through the Explorer and looked for new additions to my file system. I didn't see anything in the program files, so I assumed that this must just have added run-time functionality to my existing .NET bits.

It turned out that I was completely right about this. After searching MSDN for a couple of minutes, I found the WinFX SDK to go along with the run-time bits I had already installed. Downloading them required me to go through a slightly new process whereby you have to download a special control (ActiveX, I'm guessing) that examines your OS and creates a validation code based on the fact that you are really running Windows. I'm not sure what the motivation is here, but I would guess that perhaps Microsoft is trying to stall the Linux Open Source folks from copying their work by forcing them to download onto Windows computers, which many of them refuse to set up, purely on the basis of technology "religion"?

I downloaded it directly onto my Vista Virtual PC using Internet Explorer 7, which was a bit of a new experience. The download dialog seemed to open more directly into the Windows Explorer than in previous versions and I noticed a bunch of Search integrations, but other than that it appeared to be pretty much the same as Internet Explorer 6 - to a layman, anyhow.

When I tried running the SDK installation, it informed me that it was going to begin by uninstalling my previous installation of the run-time components. This was a bit irritating - since the link on my Vista desktop had suggested that I install the SDK in addition to the run-time components. Grrr!

As it turned out, I had accidentally chosen the wrong link from the Web page and downloaded the run-time components and tried to reinstall them! So after undoing my mistake I was able to proceed on to the SDK installation.

The SDK installed smoothly enough but it took about an hour. Now, for purposes of comparison, I also tried installing the SDK on my regular desktop operating system - Windows XP. I was surprised to see that it actually took a few hours on my desktop OS, so apparently the slowness was unrelated to the fact that it was a Virtual PC, in this case.

Once the SDK was finished installing, I installed the final piece of recommended software, which is the recently released Visual Studio - the Microsoft Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX Beta 1. These extensions are supposed to make Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 sensitive to the existence of the WinFX SDK on a given machine.

Immediately after the Visual Studio Extensions finished installing, I started up Visual Studio 2005 and looked for signs that support had been added for WinFX. I didn't have to look for very long at all. As shown in Figure 1, the Visual Studio extensions create new project groups under both Visual Basic and C# for Avalon - WinFX's new presentation subsystem.

Each of the Avalon project types shown in Figure 1 operates a little bit differently. The first one - the basic Avalon Application - should be your default choice when creating a new Avalon application, unless you have specific reasons for choosing one of the other project types.

One example of such a situation might be if you know in advance that you would like your Avalon application to run in a reduced-permissions setting, such as within the CLR Sandbox of an Internet Explorer instance. In such an instance, you would want to use the Avalon Express Application project, which is preconfigured to create such applications.