Windows Vista a Paradigm Shift: Key Features Exposed on It's ShowTime!

I've been playing around with Vista a lot as well as doing a lot of reading about it. More and more I've come to realise that beyond any of the hype Windows Vista really represents a paradigm shift in the OS space. It's similar to what Windows WinNT was to 3.x or DOS and Windows 3.x was to OS/2 Warp. Vista and Windows XP are very different technically. All the fundamentals have changed, memory, disk, network and underlying security. The kernel is mostly new, the network stack has been rewritten to support IP4/IP6 with toredo tunnelling support and the firewall is two-way with a new policy driven engine. There are stacks of new Group Policies - literally 1000's using a new XML based framework of ADMX files.

Within that context I thought I'd point you to some of the latest videos which highlight in some depth the new features in Vista. Just click on the video titles below to access them at your leisure.

Account Control: Running Windows Vista with Least Privilege

This session talks about the technology behind this change to Windows, including the isolation of Admin from Standard User code on the same desktop, the policy control in the enterprise, and how to write and deploy good Standard User applications.

Windows PowerShell: Next Generation Command Line Scripting

In this session, learn how PowerShell also serves as the foundation for our next generation of Admin GUIs so that everything you can do from the GUI you'll be able to do from the command line. You'll never view command line scripting the same way again.

Windows Vista Security Guide

This session includes live demonstrations of the tools and templates supplied with the Windows Vista Security Guide. Topics for this session include: development process for the guide; definition of security levels and target organizations; considerations to make before deploying security settings; specific guidance on securing the most important features of Windows Vista; deployment techniques and tips to reduce cost and improve reliability; and initial configuration control to ensure that Windows Vista starts and remains secure.