Windows Vista Dissected: Part 10- Working With Data

Namespace Improved:

After a brief, detour where we talked about socoial bookmarking, we continue on Vista Dissected.

The names for well-known Windows objects, like Windows XP's My Computer and My Documents, have lost "My". They are now simply "Computer" and "Documents." That's the way it should be. But that's just a minor aspect of the changes to the "shell namespace" in Windows Vista. When you dig a little deeper, you'll find more profound change.

To start with, the Documents and Settings folder is just an alias (called a "junction" in Vista file-system speak). Its purpose is to redirect installing programs that aren't hip to Vista's new way of doing things from Documents and Settings to the new Users folder.

Vista's new \Users folder houses individual user account folders. But there are some differences. The old All Users folder is now a junction to the new ProgramData subdirectory in the root directory. The Default User subdirectory is a junction to the new \User\Default subdirectory. The Application Data folder now redirects to the Roaming subdirectory in the AppData folder, located in the specific account name folders of the Users area. I'm not going to detail every change, but suffice it to say that there are several functionalities that these changes support, including improved security, more logical organization of user data, and the ability to access user data safely and smartly from a variety of places on a network.

Not sure how much trouble or problems this will cause during transition between XP and Vista. Hopefully with right tutorialy the transition shouldn't be too bad.

There's also a new top-level Public folder, the foundation for a replacement of the old Shared Documents folder from XP's My Computer. The Public folder is designed to be a resource to share things on a local area network. Why store the same 600MB of pictures on every computer on a family network, when you can store it on one public volume accessible to all? The Public area offers public folders for Favorites, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos and Recorded TV.

My better management of file structure. Less duplication.

The Documents folder is no longer the primary locus of user data files. It merely contains documents. A new folder, named the same as your account name (but which should probably be called something like {Account Name}'s Data), offer these folders all at the same level: Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches and Videos.

Microsoft is trying to separate the areas where programs are allowed to write data from where programs are stored. That's a very good thing indeed, because the operating system should jealously guard the namespace for applications, and not let just any program write there. By doing so, it prevents nefarious scripts or hackers from trying to create a malware executable that masquerades as a trusted primary .EXE, like iexplore.exe (Internet Explorer's main executable). This has been a huge problem in all previous versions of Windows.

Much better managemnet of resources(separation between user resources, and application resources) where hackers will have a harder infilitrating a Windows Vista machine.


tags: software, microsoft, Windows Vista, Vista Namespace