As you have probably already seen over at Brandon Leblanc’s blog, we had a rather interesting discussion about our expectations for RC1.  We all pretty much agreed on the fact that RC1 has to prove to be stable, and I mean REALLY stable.  But on top of that there has to be consistency throughout the whole user interface.  As people have already pointed out, things like the Install new fonts dialog are reminiscent of Windows NT 3.51 (NT 3.51 because of the long filename support).  Vista is Microsoft’s chance to change their reputation of horribly inconsistent UI’s and give us something that is truly unified and looks like it all fits together in the same puzzle.

People wonder why Apple users always poke fun at the Windows UI?  Well it’s because of inconsistency (and the fact that Luna was just plain ugly but that’s another story for another day).

So in short, my expectations for Vista RC1 are for it to be very stable and have the performance of an OS that the average person can use day to day (mind you I have been using Vista full time since 5342).  I also want to see a unified interface, no more dialogs or icons from ancient versions of windows.  Windows team, I am not asking you to change the underlying code at all, just make everything consistent!  Laziness is not the way to create a good operating system.