CodeSmith on Windows 7

CodeSmith on Windows 7

First and foremost: CodeSmith 5.0 is (unofficially) 100% compatible with Windows 7, 64 bit edition!

I say "unofficially" because obviously I am not allowed to make such a statement with out extensive testing, certification, and or blah blah blah...but hey, "it works on my machine!"

But seriously, we have done some internal testing here at CodeSmith Tools, and so far we have not experienced any issues with running CodeSmith Professional 5.0 on Windows 7 (x64). So for all you brave pioneers out there: that should be one less arrow to worry about!

Windows 7 Beta

I have been running the Windows 7 Beta on my personal laptop (an ASUS G50VT) since the beginning of January. So far, I have to give it TWO THUMBS WAY UP!

I am not proud to say it, but I pretty much skipped over Vista entirely...
*insert sob story about getting frustrated with Vista here*
...to Microsoft's credit, they were not afraid to try something new; and while SP1 did fix Vista, it was a little too late for me.

After reading almost nothing but very positive reviews (and feeling guilty about still living in 2001), I decided to grab a copy of Windows 7 and give it a shot. Windows 7 was a reasonable 3 gig download. The OS installed first try, and only took less than 30 minutes. Even on my picky gaming laptop, drivers were easy to install. Almost every application I have wanted to use installed first try, and the ones that didn't were almost all fixed by simply setting compatibility mode to Vista.

Aside from being both fast and stable, Windows 7 also has plenty of other good features. Everything about the new taskbar is phenomenal. The pinning, the preview pane combined with Aero peek...it's a great series of intuitive features that all come together to form a dynamic and sleek new interface. The OS provides native Virtual Hard Drive support; you can create, mount, even boot from them! Also, the new backup system takes advantage of this by allowing Windows to back up a system image straight to VSD.

Development on Windows 7

Having had such a good experience at home, I decided to try out Windows 7 at work. First try, no errors, no hang ups, no complications, I installed all the following software...

1. Visual Studio 2008 w/ SP1
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008
3. CodeSmith 5.0
4. TestDriven.Net
5. NUnit
6. Asp.Net MVC RC2
7. Aptana Studio
8. Firefox 3.0 w/ Firebug 1.3
9. SlySoft Virtual CloneDrive

...and so far, everything has worked flawlessly.

So in conclusion, when I say CodeSmith works on Windows 7, I am also saying that it builds on Windows 7.