ADMs in Vista--a whole new world
If you're familiar with creating custom ADM files to modify which registry values you can control in Administrative Template policy, prepare for a whole new world when Vista ships. During one of the GP sessions in June at TechEd US, MS mentioned that in Vista, the ADM file format would be changing to an XML-based one. While this has yet to be made available as a general beta, those who have Vista build 5270 will see the first incarnation of these files. Since this isn't public yet, I can only make some general observations about this change. The first is that, while the ADM file format was not necessarily intuitive, anyone with Notepad or a text editor could create a custom ADM without a lot of effort. However, XML opens up a whole new ballgame. How many administrators out there are XML-fluent? Prepare to be confused. Not only will creating custom ADM files in Vista require having a good XML editor and being at least reasonably knowledgeable of well-formed XML, but the syntax that was used in ADM files will likely change completely as well. So, bottom line is, everything you know is wrong! More on this as the new format becomes publicly available. My advice-- bone up on XML.
Anonymous comments are disabled