The non admin install dream

[Immelman]

I have been reading article upon article about how vista has made the non administrator install possible with file and registry virtualization.

But when I ran my IA setup.exe as a standard user on Vista Ultimate the behaviour of the setup was no different than that of a lowly user in XP.

The behaviour of the setup was as follows: Setup proceeds through all of the dialogs without any problems untill the next button is clicked on the startinstallation dialog and the files actually need to be writen to the target PC. Now I know by default the User profile is denied write access to the program files directory. And that is the reason why I get the "You have insufficiant priviledges to write to this directory $TARGETDIR$"

All I want to know is why can't I use IA to check write access priviledges to my installation directory before I rech the installation point and then give him a dialog to run program as administrator? Instead of setting him up for diassapointment when it's time to actually write the files to his PC.

Comming back to the Vista issue I mentioned earlier the whole concept of storing your program's system data in user specific folders makes no sense to me. Wont having a separate copy of the software for each user cause a maintanance nightmare for the admin who has to make sure that each user is on the latest version of your software? Not even mentioning what the effect might be on your centralized application data if it gets opened by an incompatible version of your software.

[jimo]

Comming back to the Vista issue I mentioned earlier the whole concept of storing your program's system data in user specific folders makes no sense to me. Wont having a separate copy of the software for each user cause a maintanance nightmare for the admin who has to make sure that each user is on the latest version of your software? Not even mentioning what the effect might be on your centralized application data if it gets opened by an incompatible version of your software.

Did Microsoft remove the "All Users\\Application Data" directory in Vista?[/quote]

[Immelman]

Hey Jimo, to answer your question... no.

According to this article: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/08/WindowsConfidential/default.aspx

"Another security change in Windows Vista is that the All Users profile has been moved out of the profiles directory and into the root of the drive (though a symbolic link has been left in the profiles directory for compatibility purposes). Some administrators share out the root of the user profiles directory as a cheap way to allow users to access their user profile from another machine."

Well regarding the virtualization in vista. I red a few articles on the microsoft technet website this weekend that kinda clarified it for me.

Check out these articles: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa906021.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/11/UAC/default.aspx