Vista and the Developer Community

I wanted to have a serious discussion on Vista and the developer community because I don't feel that it supports the developer community as well as XP does. I do want to acknowledge that Vista's infrastructure seems to be really robust and Vista has a very solid feel to it but there are things that are just plain missing from Vista or another way of putting it, Vista has regressed with GUI.

For me the most used frequently used utlity on vista is Windows Explorer. Nominally, I'll have as many as four copies running. Where is the UP button Why has it disappeared   Navigation is much less facilitated. As a result, I find myself using DIR in the command window much more than I ever did in XP. That's regression. It would have been quite easy for Microsoft to have included a "Pro" option under the explorer tools options. Another thing that vista does is to choose what it displays, so instead of a "Details" display, Explorer is likely to show me Artist and Genre instead of file size and creation date. This can be fixed with a directories property sheet, but again the burden is placed upon the developer to do this. Lastly, the Address bar requires addtional operations to obtain a file path. The display is made for none computer people. It does not display the device and I have five disk partitions. That's another thing. Vista doesn't allow more than four partitions. I had to raw format my drive under XP to obtain the fifth partion and then install Vista.

There are lots of nice things about Vista but the most important utility on Vista for developers has regressed to make it easy to use and "Easy to use" does not support the system-centricity of the developer's world.