Get your code ready: Windows Vista is just around the corner

Microsoft has put together an online developer readiness community to help organizations get ready for Windows Vista. Anyone can visit this site at http://devreadiness.org, and anybody who's planning to build code for or migrate code to the Vista platform should probably do so some time soon. You'll find a large amount of content on this site, with a lot of useful documentation, educational material and even software to help you assess your readiness for Windows Vista and get ready for a new target platform for development.

Among the many items available through this site, here's an important smattering of items worth further investigation:

• The Windows Vista Jumpstart toolkit: white papers, presentations, tools and videos designed to assist independent software developers (ISVs) as they decide how their Windows XP applications are likely to be affected by the move to Windows Vista.
• Top 10 Ways to Light Up Your Windows Vista Apps: a series of pointed advice and reminders about what it takes for developers to get ready for Windows Vista. Covers Windows Vista style guidelines, Windows Presentation Foundation, use of metadata, security topics, design changes to improve manageability and reliability, customer feedback mechanisms and more.
• Information about the Certified for Windows Vista Software Quality Logo program, designed to walk developers through the requirements and qualifications necessary to participate in the program, along with associated marketing and promotion benefits for developers.
• Details on planning for deployment and use of IPv6 in the Windows Vista environment.
• Access to the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, a beta software tool that runs on Windows XP computers to determine if the they can handle Windows Vista or not. The tool automatically scans the computer on which it runs and generates a report that documents any potential compatibility issues it might identify, and provides advice on how to get that PC ready for Windows Vista.

You'll also find coverage of the new Internet Explorer 7.0 and potential compatibility issues, an application verifier and lots of other stuff. The files area is of particular interest, because it includes numerous developer overviews as well as best practices for user account control in Windows Vista.

Ed Tittel is a writer and trainer whose interests include XML and development topics, along with IT Certification and information security. E-mail etittel@techtarget.com with comments, questions, or suggested topics or tools to review. Cool tools rule!

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