This has been troubling me for a few years, and was recently exacerbated by the introduction of Windows Vista (driver requirements & UAC restrictions being major factors).
There are many different flavours of Windows Vista (compared here), and there are also the alternative options (running Windows Server as a workstation) but for the life of me I don't know which is the best choice for a development workstation.
Vista is a pain to use as a development environment (for many reasons I don't want to go into here), but the alternatives also have some serious drawbacks as well.
Windows Server 2008 makes a logical choice, but requires a lot of extra configuration and tweaking (not to mention it's obviously not designedd for high end graphics or other development machine requirements).
The question is: what is the (current) preferred Microsoft operating system for MS platform development? ..or alternatively, why is there no "Developer Edition" for Vista?
Personally, I use Windows Server 2008 but I've seen a lot of developers sticking with Windows XP and more than a few using Vista. Obviously some development (e.g. DirectX) really has to be done on XP or Vista.. but for the standard WinForms/Web and server development work what would be the gold standard?
What do you use (if you're using an MS operating system) and why does it work for you? What did you consider as an alternative?
Use what you are most comfortable with. There's no single answer to this because it varies according to:
Besides, if you write software to run in XP, Vista and Server you'll still have to test it in all those platforms.
I personally use both XP and Vista and have had no troubles, but when I do Windows I do nothing very special (plain .NET winforms, some remoting maybe, DB access, not much else), so I haven't noticed big differences. On Vista I run VS 2008, applied a patch and haven't had any trouble running it as my local user account (it's Ultimate though). On XP I use 2005 and it also works without problems.