TechReady in Seattle....

You may have wondered why I have been a little quiet of late. Well, the reason [beyond actually having a vacation of Christmas and New Year] is that I am currently in Seattle at an internal Microsoft event called TechReady. At this conference, we have a huge number of training courses on many of the new and up-coming technologies.

I thought beyond letting you know where I am I wouold give you a heads up on some of the technologies you willl be seeing and hearing more of in the near future. For example Win PE 2.0, which is being used for a whole host of things from deploying Windows Vista and many other tools is being made available to all corporate customers and not just those with Software Assurance: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/deploy/winpe.mspx

I am currently sitting in a session on Windows Vista deployment and I can't believe the tools that are going to be available. If you can imagine in Windows XP we had 5 text files for an unattended cutomised installation. In Windows Vista there is a tool that allows you to select an image, create your single answer file for everything from drivers to applications, delta your packages in to the WIM file and deploy it to a distribution point. All I can say is gimme gimme gimme. Tools like this will make creating and maintining a very small set of images soooo much easier.

Over the rest of the week, I shall tell you what I can about more of the great stuff from TechReady in Seattle.

Enjoy!