Off the Topic

Microsoft Desktop of the Future Tour

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 31, 2006 ⋅ Tags: Windows

The day consisted of four 1.5 hour sessions; I’ll break them down a bit over the next few days. But first, my overall thoughts, the whole event wasn’t really a sales pitch – which I thought it was going to be. I would have thought that this was the perfect time to market to people in IT about why Vista/Office 2007 should be immediately deployed across the corporate network. The presenters didn’t do that, and in there defense, I don’t think that was their goal. Each session they picked a few points to talk about and then did some demo’s (sadly, no BSOD!). They made a point that the best way to learn anything is by actually using it, stressing for us to checkout the public beta of Office 2007 and the upcoming public beta of Vista Beta 2 (June 5th/6th but don’t hold a gun to their head).

90 minutes wasn’t nearly long enough; they picked a few things and demoed them, so I really don’t have a great feel on Vista from this session. They talked about the aero interface, demoing the graphical touches (realtime screenshots for alt+tab, rollidex-like screenshots for WinKey+Tab). It looks nice, nothing special – and I’m generally an eye-candy guy. (No mention of the Vista desktop widget side-bar thingie, though it was running on their systems the whole time)

Search has been heavily reworked. Every modern OS now has the file system indexed and allows you to retrieve search results quickly. I’ve never really used the search tool previously, so it was hard for me to be excited. All I could think about was the overhead of indexing your system in the background. Search results could be saved, creating “virtual search folders” with the results, that when accessed, would update the results to reflect what was currently on the system. The example was creating a search folder with all of Dave’s marketing documents. It’s pretty clear to me that Vista is trying to get away from working within the file system, making it more abstract – documents don’t have to be organized in a nice file structure for them to be accessible and useful.

IE7 was a large focus of the Vista demo, almost exclusively focusing on the security that’s been added. IE7 runs in what they call “protected mode” which isolates the browser from the system (separate memory, separate file system). It’s basically a backtrack on their idea of integrating the browser so tightly to the OS from previous versions. Now its a marketing feature! Still, it’s a great thing. I’d like to see if IE7 for XP has this ability…

Anti-phishing feature uses an algorithm to determine whether a site is suspicious or not (little details, but some of the things it looks for is IP with SSL instead of a hostname + a login box). The phishing-sites database is updated continuously, from Microsoft. Users may also submit sites that will be evaluated manually, by Microsoft, for inclusion into the database.

RSS (real simple syndication) is now included with IE7 (also integrates into Outlook 2007); a me-too feature and not overly exciting.

Vista security. User Access Control (UAC) is the biggie. Microsoft is making the push to move everyone away from running Windows with admin privileges. (I have to note that they were running all the demo’s as admins). Briefly, any admin-type function dims the screen and prompts you for the proper credentials. Interestingly, even when running as Admin, you are notified and prompted before doing the actions. The difference, you don’t have to provide the password. There isn’t much to say here, quite similar to sudo in Unix. Should have done this years ago …

Ships with anti-spyware (Windows Defender) but not anti-virus (16 Billion/yr industry, scared of lawyers). No demo for Defender but its based on the Microsoft Anti-Spyware that they bought and rebranded, only its been rebranded again to Defender. Firewall has been retooled, supposedly making it possible to have layers of security across your network (integrated ipsec with the firewall). No demo, but basically we define a group of machines with certain access rights to each other; defining smaller trusted-groups across the network. Firewall is bi-directional, but allows all outbound by default. Can be managed by group policy; in fact, it was made a point that “everything” is controllable by group policy, easily.

Parental Controls (yes it will even be called this in the corporate world). This is pretty neat, especially in the home where I have a ton of kludge to handle some of these issues for my kids. Basically, it’s a one-stop shop for controlling access to the system. When can the system be used, what programs can run and when, what types of games can be played, which websites are allowed (looks like it has some attempt at content filtering too), etc. Also, nice activity reports (how many emails were sent on X day, top 10 websites visited today, etc). Event Viewer got a nice new coat of paint. Some highlights, ability to forward events to a central location, react on certain events (send email, restart service, etc). This fits into the rework of Task Scheduler, which can now react to many different types of events/actions. Lastly, a few quick bullet points:

• all system dll’s are signed and verified on every access, vista will not load them if the signature is invalid
• full volume encryption (BitKeeper), requires motherboard with TPM1.2 (most machines in the last few years) for authentication. Can also use USB dongle + pins. The disk is decrypted on boot, and then completely transparent to user throughout the use of the system. Solves the lost/stolen laptop problem.
• built in file system SHRINK! It was the only thing all day that got a round of applause.