>Enterprise edition requires you to enter the Enterprise MAK key to activate

 

Take care here, as I could only activate by these commands:

 

slmgr -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

slmgr -ato

 

Overall though, I've got Win8 and VS2012 up and running in a VM and it's
going well. After a couple of hours of using Win8 in a semi-realistic way
I'm getting a feel for the pros and cons. The gaping chasm between the world
of Win8 Metro and our current shell environment is starting to sting. There
are not yet any Metro apps that interest me, despite trying most the
standard ones and some of the store samples. As smooth and lovely as some of
the Metro apps are, they are huge, clumsy and full of empty space; I feel
like a 2 year old fumbling with a coloured blocks. I can't directly start
any of my daily working apps from the old no-Start-button shell without
making desktop shortcuts (not a habit of mine), I have to go back to the
Metro Apps screen to launch something. So I'm continually going back and
forth like a madman between the two worlds. It's like having two different
operating systems stuck together in an unholy embrace, each vying for my
attention. When I'm on the Metro side I'm utterly fed-up with having each
app fill my screen. I start IE, Music, SkyDrive, Calendar, etc and each one
fills my gigantic screen and I have to Alt-Tab madly to find what I was
doing as I can't find a way of knowing at any time what is actually running
(and my real work is back on the old shell anyway).

 

So after a few hours my Win8 experience is not going well. Perhaps there are
shortcuts and UI tricks I'm not aware of yet to help me, but they're not
obvious. Developers like us are not "ordinary" users, so perhaps it's unfair
to compare my experience with what your average suburbanite will feel. I
remain bewildered by the split-personality operating system and the huge
obtrusive clumsiness of Metro apps. I'm trying not to be biased by what I'm
used to, but unless I find lots of UI shortcut tricks and tips Win8 will be
mostly redundant and I'll spend my working day in the old shell which still
has things called "windows".

 

If there are developers out there now using Win8 in anger for daily work I'd
be interested to hear your practical counter-arguments to my "newbie"
complaints.

 

Greg

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