Vista is RTM and pricing.

It's of no surprise to most that the full version of Vista is complete on November 8, because that date has been pretty firmly set for a while. That leaves the November 30 release for business customers and January 30 for retail looking pretty solid. After using RC1 I figured the date sounded very reasonable a month or so ago.

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/windows-vista-releases-to-manufacturing.aspx

While plenty of work has been going on in Microsoft, a lot of discussion has been happening outside discussing the features, version comparisons and pricing of Vista.

My current reasons why I would upgrade to Vista from XP include:
IIS7
Improved Media Centre
Nice built in search
Easier to find and open any programs
Built in .net 3.0, IE7, Media Player 11, DVD movie maker
Excellent backup restore options
Repartioning tool
Use USB key to speed up computer (at $Au27 for 1GB very cheap speed increase)

And why I wouldn't:
Home Premium doesn't have remote desktop or IIS, which means it's a downgrade from XP media centre
Too many annoying popups when doing daily tasks
May still not be stable enough compared to XP
Price, in Australia at least

So what do I mean by price in Australia? Take a quick look at two upgrade options I have and compare US prices to Australian prices:
Home Premium Upgrade
$US in US = $159
$US in Au = $230

Ultimate Upgrade
$US in US = $259
$US in Au = $380

That's RRP, so it's likely big US chains will come out even cheaper (as should a few Australian stores to). But have a look at the gap between Ultimate upgrade prices in Australia and the US. Rediculous!

I'm certainly going to heavily investigate my options of getting a copy in the US, even though I know it will be locked down pretty tight.

That said I'm willing to upgrade and hoping to get Ultimate given the few extra features that I will use.

.net 3.0 official release

With Vista literally on our doorstep, the .net 3.0 framework has been officially released.

Check out all the usual downloads for the official version here:
http://www.netfx3.com/blogs/news_and_announcements/archive/2006/11/06/.NET-Framework-3.0-has-been-released_2100_.aspx

And of course don't forget the Virtual labs to help you get up and running:
http://labs.netfx3.com/

UPDATED:
Here is the whole list of links including the Office 2007 downloads for Visual Studio and AJAX for asp.net:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/devsolutions/

And since it's supported on XP and every version of Vista, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into WPF especially over the next few months now.

Vista retail licensing. Microsoft backs down.

This is slightly off topic, and no doubt not really programming related, more programmer related.

Vista retail licensing has been a well discussed topic over the last few weeks. In short for someone like me it went like this:
As long as I only upgrade my machine hardware once in the years that I want to use Vista as my OS, I'm fine. Once I upgrade a 2nd time though I need to buy a new version of Vista. To me this is scarey, and means I'd really want to make sure the next hardware upgrade would be a good one, as I'm not that happy with outlaying hundreds of dollars after only owning Vista for a couple of years.

BUT NOT ANY MORE!!!!!

Microsoft have officially backed down and will now allow a single user to upgrade their hardware as much as they like. For me that takes the expected usage from 2-3 years, to whenever a better OS worth buying comes out, as I'm more than happy with my core hardware like the case, and will most likely just upgrade components as mine get out of date.

Take a look at the official blog about this:
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/02/news-revision-to-windows-vista-retail-licensing-terms.aspx

Very good news from Microsoft, thanks for listening to the 5-10% of people who would actually care about this change of licensing.