Jim Allchin has a great post over on the Vista Team's blog about the tradeoffs and choices made in terms of all the new Vista security features such as User Account Control (UAC) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP). He really drills into the importance of those feaures but also the importance of not making them so cumbersome that users turn them off. Also remember that these design choices will end up effecting hundreds of millions of users over Vista's lifetime and you can see the importance of seemingly small decisions like "should we really prompt the user when he tries to change x, y, or z?". Also you can see from his post that there was quite a bit of feedback from beta testers and customers that was taken into account and did result in changes.
By now most of you have probably been exposed to PowerShell in one way or another. Like me, you probably realize how powerful it is and how important it is going to be to have a good understanding of it but you haven't had time to site down and really dig in to it. Of course a great resource is the PowerShell team's blog. Another great resource though is the PowerShell Analyzer. Here is the description from their website at http://www.powershellanalyzer.com/
"Powershell Analyzer is a rich interactive environment for Windows Powershell. Its goal is to be the powershell host of choice for IT professionals and system administrators. It has all the typical editor and IDE functionality that you would expect when working on a modern language, but it focuses on the real time interactive experience as if you were at the console, helping you compose the commands you want to use, and also giving you rich graphical visualization of the results."
There is a seven minute video that demonstrates a good bit of the features at this link. Enjoy!
Sorry it's been so long since I posted, I've been very busy with projects, vacation, and the holidays. Below is a link to the Microsoft Architect Journal vol 9. The theme of this issue is Software Factories. I'd also call your attention to the article on the Perspective Based Architecture Method, by Lewis Curtis and George Cerbone. Both are Microsoft Certified Architects like myself and I have heard Lewis present this approach and I think there is some valuable material in there. In the near future I'll write a post on how I use some of these concepts on my projects.
Microsoft Architect Journal 9