The Moth

While many developers have been playing with various builds of Vista over the last 2 years, now that Vista Beta 2 is available, many more will start experiencing what is shaping up as the biggest release of Windows ever. I've captured below (in no particular order) some online resources to get you started.

If you have Vista site/blog which you think is of interest to developers, ping me with the URL and I may include it below.

1. Visit the 3 official sites that I link to from my Vista Beta 2 post. Then go download the Vista product guide.

2. Read the developer call to action: Top 10 things to do (TIP: on the left in the explorer view you can find 15+ additional articles to consume including the Application Compatibility Cookbook) and use the appcompat tools. Also keep an eye on the continuously updated developer story.

3. The Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) can be browsed online or downloaded locally.

4. With the next wave of technologies including Vista, you will hear the term User Experience (UX) being thrown about quite a bit. One element of that can be comprehended by reading the guidelines and understanding the aero aesthetics.

5. A controversial feature for some and essential for most, is the User Acount Control (UAC), which you should learn about immediately by reading here and here. In this context, some of you may need to understand COM Elevation Moniker.

6. Check out Gadgets that are a new type of task-specific "application" with a huge cool factor.

7. As you'd expect many presentations have been given about Vista. Download the presentations from the PDC 2005 and Mix06 conferences. Also sign up for the upcoming Vista webcasts.

8. Go view the Windows Vista channel9 videos.

9. For support, please visit the newsgroups and msdn forums. Other communities include DevReadiness.

10. There are a whole bunch of blogs dedicated to Vista (or at least with some strong content on it):
SDK Team , Network Access Protection , User Account Control , Vista Team , Tom Archer , Tim Sneath , Andre Da Costa , DWM

11. Here is a small selection of not-strictly-developer-focused Vista resources, as I reckon they will be of interest to some :-)
VistaBase , TweakVista , SuperSite , VistaMania