Windows 2008 – First Look

I had the opportunity to play with a release candidate of Windows 2008 recently. One of the devs was working with some .NET 3.x stuff and it seemed like just the ticket to give him a playground. I downloaded it from our MSDN account and gave it a try.

The Upside

First off, the installer offers probably the best, easiest and most painless experience I’ve ever seen installing an OS. Seriously, it is awesome.

It’s the kind of install that finishes up with you asking, “Really? That’s it?” (oops, saw some guys wince on re-living those words — apologies!)

I installed it on a sort of spare parts machine. An old’ish Dell with a 2.4 Celeron and 2 GB of RAM and a massive 80 GB drive. Not a smokin’ machine, but it seemed to handle Win2K8 just fine. (requirements if you’re curious)

The Downside

Clearly we — the developers and myself — are missing out on something fundamental when it comes to working with a Windows 2008 server. All we’ve done for 2 weeks is fart around with various and sundry permissions issues.

The machine is in our domain. I even went so far as to plop the developers’ group into the Domain Admins. But even something as simple as a deployment would get all bolluxed up. Heck, at one point we couldn’t even edit a web.config — with Notepad!

Perhaps something went south in that seemingly simple and smooth install. Or maybe there was a checkbox somewhere that I didn’t check. I dunno. But for now I’ll hang loose and wait for the release — and some patches — before I go back down this road.

A bummer really as I saw some pretty cool stuff there.

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Robb Lochaber

February 13th, 2008 at 12:32 pm · Reply

I’m ready to try it out on a test machine, but can’t possibly imagine using it in a production environment, even if it was SP2 or SP3. I’ll stick with my CentOS server, thanks.