Musings of a PC

Thoughts about Windows, TV and technology in general

Tech-Ed 2006: Deploying Windows Vista – Everything You Need in One Hour

Leave a comment Posted by on June 13, 2006
On the whole, this was a very useful grounding session in the tools and technologies that Microsoft have put together to make it easier for Vista to be deployed. It didn’t go into a lot of detail, but it did touch on the WIM file format being used, WinPE 2, building a WinPE boot disc, WDS, etc. Of course, if you use BDD, you probably don’t need to touch any of this, but as an IT Pro, it is often useful to understand what is going on underneath the hood and this session dealt with just that.
 
I was pretty annoyed, though, when Corey recommended to the audience that User Account Control be turned off during testing and development. My objection to this recommendation is:
  • If you turn it off for testing and development, there is a risk that you’ll turn it off for production. You don’t want to do that.
  • Turning off UAC is pretty similar to running everything as administrator. This is one of the key things that Microsoft is trying to solve with Vista. How much commercial software is there that doesn’t run properly under XP if you don’t have admin rights? How much of that happened because developers run as admin during development?
  • Microsoft are trying to improve UAC and reduce the number of times you get prompted. How can we effectively provide them with feedback on this if we all turn it off?

Apart from that one glaring boo-boo, this was a good session.

Tech-Ed

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