Vista Home premium edition not good enough for .Net developer

I recently wrote a blog entry about upgrading my laptop from XP to Vista home premium which I received free from Sony from the Vista Express upgrade program. I thought that the Home Premium edition would be sufficient for development of software as I do not usually connect to a windows domain.

This proved to be wishful thinking however and I recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate edition to allow me to be able to do my day to day development. This has simplified things greatly.

The main reason I had to perform this upgrade is because of the lack of Authentication options in IIS web server. With the home edition you do not have the option to enable "Integrated Authentication" as a result I could not accurately test a lot of the web applications that I am developing and maintaining. I was able to get so far using "Basic Authentication" on the home edition but there were still problems even trying various impersonation settings. When working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2005 it would not work for me until the "Integrated Authentication" option was used.

In addition to this connecting to network shares and networked printers has become simplicity itself. Even though I am not logged onto the windows server domain when I first enter a username and password to connect to these network resources Vista then remembers this and never prompts me for this again. There is a new "manage your network passwords" option in "User Accounts" section of the control panel that looks after these passwords for you. With Home premium I had to repeatedly enter these passwords again after every reboot of the laptop.

Oh, and on the gimmick front, you get Texas holdem poker and DreamScene, which allows you to have small looped video clips as your desktop wallpaper, such as a waterfall or clouds moving.