I have always been adamant that as a web developer it is far better to use Windows Server 2003 rather than Windows XP as your primary workstation. This view became necessary primarily because Windows XP had a stripped-down set of IIS services, namely it was IIS 5.0 rather than IIS 6.0, and it was constrained to not allow multiple virtual hosts on the same machine. This made XP worthless; being a web developer, having the process forced down my throat of building entire web applications as "subwebs" made things infinitely more difficult to develop against. For example, you could never have a simple hyperlink that starts with a slash ("/"). You had to build everything around the ASP/ASP.NET coding model of application root ("~/"), which required you to move all of your hyperlinks to server-side code (<asp:Hyperlink>, or <img src="<%= ResolveUrl("~/") %>images/bleah.gif">).

No more. Windows Vista has multiple web server support. Microsoft perhaps got tired of basically every web developer on the planet expressing their animosity towards the Windows team for their crippling of IIS without even so much as an alternate "IIS add-on for MSDN Universal subscribers" or something. It's full-blown IIS 7, same as in Windows Server 2008.

Now that Windows Server 2008 is released, the inevitable questions should be asked (rather than the answers assumed based on prior experience with XP / 2003): does Windows Server 2008 have any new features that Windows Vista doesn't have, that a typical ASP.NET web developer would want on his workstation, and does Windows Vista have any undesirable features that are not present in Windows Server 2008 that cannot be removed from Vista?

While the answer to both of these questions were "yes" in XP/2003, for Vista/2008 I think the general answer to both of these questions, I believe, is "no".

In Windows 2008 there are a gajillion new services that the next wave of Internet technologies will need on hand for regular development. For developers of one of these next-gen technologies, Server 2008 might be essential. But for basic ASP.NET and WCF development (in other words, for most web developers), Vista can suffice.

And 2008 doesn't really filter out anything from the Vista experience except for the fact that the Vista experience is an option rather than mandatory. That's nice; but if it's going to be used for a workstation, it makes sense to just add it. Only problem is, it's not a complete Vista experience; you don't get the sidebar, for instance, and Call of Duty 4 crashes on a co-worker / friend who agreed to be a Windows Server 2008-as-a-workstation guinea pig. And to be honest, I feel a lot more uncomfortable with all the undesirable new bells and whistles of Server 2008 being available to my workstation than with them missing from a Vista environment.

The only features I saw in Server 2008 that I didn't see in Vista that might be worth something to me were: Multipath I/O, TCP port sharing, and hypervisor (native virtualization) support (which is still in beta). Actually, Vista might have the first two of the three, I don't recall. But I already have VMWare Workstation, which I continue to prefer over that awful Virtual PC platform. Meanwhile, pretty much all of the other stuff, while some of it may be valuable, it's all so server-oriented and not development-oriented that it would make more sense to move that stuff to a VM or external environment anyway.

So my tentative conclusion is that Vista Ultimate is already the ideal environment for a web developer. With it, you have all the basics that you need to build multiple IIS solutions and to test basic WCF solutions. Meanwhile you get to keep the fluff you like (and I do like some fluff on my workstation, gimme Sidebar and stuff), while you can still kill off the fluff you don't like.