I’ve been running Windows 8 virtualized on and off for a while, but because it ran in a VM, I never really forced myself to use it, it was more of a novelty than anything. So I decided to take the plunge and installed Windows 8 Release Preview on my primary workstation. Along with it I also installed Visual Studio 2012 and Office 2013 (just came out on MSDN)
So far I must say I really like it. Sure, the UI changes take a bit getting used to and lack of the start button seemed a bit odd at first, but I got used to hitting the start button the keyboard pretty quick. The OS is pretty snappy and seems stable.
I did notice that the Firefox does tend to choke a bit occasionally, so using IE10 as the main browser for the moment. Thankfully there’s a compatible Xmarks plugin so all my settings have moved over to IE10. Will give Chrome a spin under Windows 8 too.
I’m still installing software but so far haven’t come across anything that hasn’t worked which is always a good thing. All devices worked straight away during the install, including the Marvel SATA III controller and USB 3 Controller.
I was surprised to find out that Windows 8 ships with Hyper-V. Too bad VMware Workstation will not install while Hyper-V is enabled. It wasn’t a tough decision which one to keep. Workstation has much better integration (Unity) than Hyper-V. I’ll try re-enabling Hyper-V post Workstation installation, see if it’ll still work. I’m also running Oracle VirtualBox along VMware Workstation (not installed it yet on Windows 8). There’s some features of VirtualBox that I like over Workstation, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day.
Visual Studio 2012 is nice. I’m really digging the new color scheme. Whatever next project I start, I’ll use VS2012 and .NET 4.5 for it. I had no problems connecting to TFS and the new TFS integration is very nice. Unfortunately (as expected), VS2012 wanted to migrate existing project files to VS2012 and I didn’t want to lose the ability to continue developing in VS2010 so I’ll leave that for now.
I am also looking forward to testing Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V 3. Would love to see some real competition for vSphere.