14 DAY TRIAL // Feature Pack 2007 is the second Community Tech Preview coming just two months and 60 reported bugs away from the first CTP that amounted to 1,500 downloads. Overall, the second CTP is a step forward catalyzed by testing feedback. Overall test coverage and quality of the feature pack are improved aspects, according to Weijuan Shi, Program Manager of the Customer Strike Team. Additionally, the customer strike team is also delivering supplementary documentation via .chm files independent from the build.
The USB Boot was also enhanced as Weijuan further revealed. "Improved formatufd.exe to support NTFS formatting and creation of partitions needed by EWF and renamed it to ufdprep.exe. A new, automatic way to include USB boot feature in the configuration eliminating the need for manual steps in the previous CTP. A version of ntdetect with debugging information called "usbntd.chk" available in the ValueAdd folder on the CD."
The File Based Write Filter has added support for NTFS compression and also files can be committed to disk without committing the whole overlay.
Weijuan also presented improvements introduced to the components of Feature Pack 2007:
- Included a number of component enhancements that provide better configuration, reduced footprint or better visibility. - Added a new macro component for Virtual PC that enables you to build an image easily for running in the Virtual PC environment. - Have a new component for configuring MessageBox pop-ups, which can be used to turn off pop-ups on headless devices. - Factored SNMP out of the IIS Webserver component which results in reduced footprint for devices that don't use SNMP.