Hello,

I am a developer. I use ASP.Net 2.0 and SQL Server to run DotNetNuke and other ASP.Net Portals. I am about to but a new laptop which is offering me Windows Vista Home Basic.

Please guide me which Windows should i buy?

Should i go for Windows Vista Home Basic or buy Windows XP Professional only as i have to use it for running ASP/ASP.Net Portals like DotNetnuke  etc.

Or any other version of Windows Vista i.e. Business etc. I basically want an OS that is better as per my requirements as a developer.

And also can i download IIS6/7 on Windows XP later on?

Please help me on this as soon as possible. Reply will be highly appreciated.

Hope to hear from someone soon.

Chitresh Singh
(Chitresh.com)

Vista Home Basic does not include IIS.  You want Home Premium, or or better, Vista Ulltimate.  You cannot "download" IIS, it's part of the OS.  XP runs IIS 5.1, you can't change that until you upgrade the OS.  Personally, Vista Ultimate works fine for me.  Note that you can run Visual Studio and the internal test server on Vista Home Basic, just no IIS.

Jeff

After struggling with the slowness of Visual Studio 2005 on a 4-year old system for the past year, I have just moved to a Intel Core-Duo (3 Mhz, 4 GB Ram) system with Windows Vista Business edition. Note that the Vista Home Basic edition does not support IIS 7 (although VS 2005 can still be used for web development using its built in web server). 

Initially I had a bit of trouble configuring IIS 7 as its management console and options are radically different from those in IIS 6. If you go with Vista and IIS 7, don't forget to turn on the "IIS metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatability" feature. For each web application you will be developing, you will also need to specify the "Classic .NET App Pool" rather than the Default App Pool.  (Other developers, please correct me if I'm wrong on the last point - my experience so far is that you cannot use the Default App Pool with VS 2005).

So far I've been very happy with Vista (although it takes a while to learn where all the settings, etc. are located) and especially the speed of the new system when opening a VS 2005 solution or page and compiling.  As soon as I'm sure that all necessary drivers are available, I'll probably upgrade (essentially free) to the 64-bit version of Vista Business so as to take advantage of the full 4 GB of ram.

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