Installing and Deploying Applications on Vista
Welcome to the User Account Control (UAC) Blog. We'll be using this forum to talk about interesting, important, or whimsical aspects of UAC and Vista.
It seems only fitting that we start out the posts with a discussion of installation. What is the very first thing you're going to do on your new Vista machine? Well...install your favorite piece of software, of course. This is where most of the world will be meeting the Consent Dialog for the first time. Have you seen it yet?
Here's a preview of an early version of the Consent Dialog -
For those of you who don't know what this is – it's the new dialog in Windows Vista that tells you when you’re going to do something that requires Administrator privileges and thus needs your approval. We’ll delve into this more in later posts. For now, just imagine that you'll be running everything in Vista as what we call a Standard User and when you want to install something or change a system setting you need to approve it.
So there we were, installing that piece of software you love and the Consent Dialog comes up. Why did it happen?
When you install a piece of software, more often than not, you need to copy files from the CD to the Program Files directory. The Program Files directory is a protected location that Standard Users can't write to, and because we know that most installs write there, we ask you for permission to run the install with your Administrator privileges.
We'll get more into the technical details about how we identify applications that are installers and how enterprises can do installations in future posts.
Cheers, Chris
