Back after a blog break

So it's been weeks since I posted anything and I'm back!  I've been travelling pretty much nonstop to meet with Universities and talk about Vista.  I spoke at the launch event in Indianapolis on the public sector track.  That was really interesting because the night before I completely lost my voice.  It was still gone for the launch, I just turned up the microphone!

Some things to catch up on.  I'm hoping to find some lab time this week because BDD 2007 has released to web.  I've been running it in a virtual server since the day it came out and loving it.   It really is a pretty short leap to go from common practices today to an easy wizard-driven and much more mature procedure.  A lot of people today put images on a file share and then boot to a Windows 98 disk and apply the image to workstations.  If that is your practice I recomend you download BDD and read over the Computer Imaging System Feature Team Guide and the Lite Touch Installation Guide.  You will find it is right in line with what you put today except it will give you wizards to do things like migrate user data and configure all the settings that would otherwise require you to build an answer file.

Speaking of answer files, I'm hoping to build a template file this week to use for unattended deployment proof of concepts.  Once I have it working I'll take out obvious things like passwords and post it.