I've been playing around with the Windows Vista Beta1 release lately, seeing how we're doing for compatibility and native look and feel. There are some minor issues that need to be fixed, but in general we're looking great. It's a nice confirmation of the changes we made in Mustang to use the uxtheme APIs in Windows to render our widgets for the Windows look & feel; we didn't need to make any changes to our code to make our widgets look correct on Vista versus XP.

Today, I installed the latest daily build of NetBeans 4.2 to see how it looked. You can see the results by clicking on this screenshot:

If you look closely, you can see that some of the text areas in the latest NetBeans bits are taking advantage of the LCD Text support we've implemented in Mustang.

By request, here are some screenshots of SwingSet2 on Mustang on Vista, running with the native look and feel; this should give you a sense of how native the controls look so far (click on the thumbnails to see a larger picture):

There are some issues to be resolved, such as the rectangular windows decorations (JInternalFrame has square buttons) and some mouseover effects that we are not yet capturing. But things are looking pretty good in general.

And remember that you can always download the latest Mustang snapshot to try out these nifty experiments yourself.

Caveats for the images above:

• Some browsers have awful support for PNG images, so if the pixels look really distorted in your browser you may try downloading the image and viewing it in an image viewing app instead. I had good luck with Firefox 1.0.7.
• The LCD text looks good on the particular display on which I took the snapshot. If you are not viewing this on an LCD display, or if your display has a very different configuration than mine, you will get different visual quality. The app running on your system would look good, but a screenshot of the app running on my system is a different thing entirely....