Thanks to the members or Momentum for the opportunity to speak about Windows Vista last week. I was asked to follow up on some questions. Sorry for the delay but it took me a while to get to them. As I researched these areas it really brought home to me the huge changes taking place to the fundamental design and behaviour of Vista that will make its day to day reliability and manageability radically better. At the moment many vista demos show whiz-bang graphics or consumer apps. That’s fine but the main message is that Vista is more reliable, secure, and capable: this is often just slide ware with no demo and I think fails to show the depth of change to backup the story of improved fundamentals. The answers to these questions are really encouraging for me as it shows the breath of work going on to make Vista a great platform.
File Metadata - I was asked a great question about how the metadata is associated with files and the relationship of this metadata to the OS. To paraphrase - how does Vista know what metadata is available for each file type and can this be customised? At the time we supposed that it was probably something to do with the registry. That’s part of the answer but the whole is more interesting. PropertyHandlers are registered (yep in the registry) for each file type and they form the basis of how the various parts of Vista interact with the file. e.g. the Indexer calls the handlers to get the properties of the file. They are a very important concept and if you want to add file types or customise the handling of existing files you can read from the guru Marc Miller here.
A follow up question was if the existing Vista File explorers default search folders can be configured. The answer is no BUT you can achieve a similar result I would assume through a custom file type and your own applications.
I demoed the new event viewer which has been well described elsewhere. I mentioned that events can now be forwarded to a central server for monitoring/recordkeeping. I was asked how this works, and was it file based? The answer is that the each machine still stores its local event log (not as XML but can be rendered or exported as such) and it can be configured to forward these events to a central server. The news got even better when I delved in and found that this is supported by WS-Management and WS-Eventing. This was discussed in PDC05 session FUN316 if you access to the DVD's.
I was then asked if there are improved backup capabilities in Vista. Yes!
SafeDocs - file based backups for people without servers. It can be used to perform incremental scheduled backups of files.
System Restore - As the name suggests - allows you to restore a system to an earlier state. This uses Shadow Copies of volumes for restore. This is already in XP but it’s improved in Vista [If you restore and individual file using File Shadow Copy it can make the System Restore as well as SafeDoc versions available to choose from].
File Shadow Copies - similar to Windows Server 2003 where shared copies of documents can be restored if accidentally deleted or wound back to earlier versions.
Bill
