WoodyPewitt20061016
From Wsms
The main page for today's class notes is here.
October 16, 2006
Windows Vista and Microsoft online training.
A presentation by Woody Pewitt, a Microsoft developer evangalist based in San Diego. Woody says that he gives talks to everyone from high school/junior high groups to development departments of large corporations. ggeller wonders if Woody could be persuaded to give a talk at my kids' school as to what software development is all about?
Contents |
Vista Features
Vista has a bunch of way cool stuff. There is a lot of eye candy for users and there is better security and integrity for sysadmin types.
Transacted File System and Registry
Anything an application does that changes the filesystem or registry can be done as a transaction. That means the person who writes an application can use an API to ask the system if it is able to do a given action, say write a file then confirm that the action was actually carried out successfully. An example of where this is important is writing to a USB flash drive when the user is likely to yank out the drive.
Ready Boost
You can use a USB 2 pen drive to effectively expand RAM. The system uses the extra RAM to cache disk reads. The data is encrypted, so there are no security worries. On reads are cached, not writes, so there is no chance of loosing data. You can even yank out the USB drive without creating a problem. It works well if a user is doing a lot of small I/O, like looking through a photo album. Ut to 4G RAM is used.
ggeller wonders if it might be worth investing in companies that make USB pen drives.
SuperFetch
No, it's not what your Yellow Lab does. Vista takes advantage of whatever cache memory is available by watching what the user does and anticipating the next action. It read off disk to rAM in advance to speed everyting up. Works well if the user has consistent habits.
System Integrity
Crashes in Windows are cause by "crappy drivers" (a technical term that Woody introduced to the class) more often than anything else. Linux, historically, has been more stable than Windows because Linux did more driver-lide stuff in user space, as opposed to in the kernel. Third party driver software causes all sorts of headaches. Microsoft is working hard on getting all the drives tested and signed.
Security
BitLocker
BitLocker is an encrypted file system that is available as part of the corporate version of Vista.
More policy options for security
With Vista, the admin can set a policy to shutdown the USB ports.
New Event Logging features
The new buzzword here is Instrumentation. The developer/sysadmin can set a policy to grab a particular type of event from people in a domain. This is a big help in seeing what is going on with your software or the machines you are administering.
Q + A
Q. Does Vista require NTFS, or can you install it in a FAT partition?
A. It requires NTFS.
Q. Does Vista do the boot.ini thing like XP if you want to dual boot different versions of Windows.
A. Yes. At least that is what it looks like.
Q. Will there be a big event for the Vista launch?
A. Yes, but not as big as the event for XP.
The main socal event will be in mid-January at the L.A. convention center.
Microsoft changed the way money for this type of event is allocated.
Now they have a bunch of little managers with smaller budgets.
So, nobody has a really big budget like they would need to do the event up like they used to.
Q. Does Office 2007 have activation.
A. Yes, just like Vista.
Q. If I have a machine with multiple removable hard drives, can I install Vista on more than one hd?
A. Yes, but you will probably have to call Microsoft to activate the OS on the extra drives.
The main reason for activation is to prevent certain people from making thousands of copies.
It's not to screw the typical home user.
