The New SWVAdmin

At first glance, SWVAdmin tool for SWV 6.1 looks the same as SVSadmin from 2.1, however many things have changed between SVS and SWV. Many of these changes are new features being added, but a number of them are old features being moved to a different, better, location or being renamed. When creating SWVAdmin we had the goal of making something that was better organized and easier to pick up and learn. This article will cover all those changes and explain why we made the changes we did.

The above image shows the new menu for SWVAdmin. The only change here is Edit has been changed to Layer and everything from the Edit menu, with the exception of "Select All", has been moved to the File menu, and several operations have been moved out of File to Layer - which is a mirror of the context menu when you have a layer selected. This was done for consistency's sake; we wanted everything relating to a specific layer (Activate, Export, Reset and so on) to be in the same place as the rest of the layer specific functions.

One more thing to note before moving on to the new File menu is that the Details View of SWVAdmin now shows the "Magic Number" of a layer's Read Only and Read Write Sub-layers. I think many of you will find this to be a useful addition because you no longer have to go to the Registry and look up which number was assigned to which layer.

We also wanted to conform to a more standard Windows application, if you check under the File menu you'll see that "Create New Layer" is now named "New Layer", likewise "Import from archive" is now simply called "Import Layer". While the names have changed the functionality is the same. Apply Patch and Create Patch are new features added into SWV and they allow you to create a Virtual Patch Archive that contains the difference between two layers (a source and target) and then allows you to convert the target layer into the source layer.

The Layer context menu is where we made the most changes to SWV. Just about everything has been reorganized for the better. The first big change was simplifying the menu item names where possible by dropping the term "Layer" from most items - since you've got a layer selected you know that you are manipulating a layer so it's redundant.

Outside of removing "Layer" we renamed a few options, specifically "Start layer automatically" which was change to "Activate On System Startup", this was done because we felt the original term was to confusing and didn't clearly describe what the user was setting. Next to be changed were "Layer properties" and "Edit advanced layer properties" which have been changed to "Info" and "Properties" respectfully. This will be the most confusing change to users of SVS since one of the names was basically switched and does something different in SWV versus SVS.

When we started to change around the menus for SWVadmin the one thing everyone wanted to change was how you update an existing layer (capturing updated to the Read Only Sub-layer instead of the Read Write Sub-layer) and move it from the File menu to the Layer context menu where it's now called "Add To Layer". Best of all, you are no longer required to select the layer after selecting the option like you did in SVS - we wanted to simplify the whole process of updating a layer because we felt it wasn't something we had done very well in SVS. The new name alone took several days of discussion to agree on.

The next item I want to talk about is "Run Application From Layer" which is a new addition to the admin tool but not new to SVS itself. Those familiar with SVScmd will know this as "Execute from Layer" where you can run something installed on the base, like Internet Explorer or Notepad, and all the changes made by that application will get captured into the layer you choose. It's one of the cooler features of SVS and we wanted it to be exposed more in SWV. We even added a new feature named "Auto Run From Layer" where you can attach a program to a layer, again like Internet Explorer, and, if the layer is inactive, SWV will activate the layer when it detected Internet Explorer launching and then run that application from the defined layer. This is all done via the new Properties window (well it's got two new tabs so not that new) and I'm sure there will be Connect content covering this feature soon.

The rest of the Layer context menu that I haven't covered contains new features added to SWV: Clone, New Reset Point, Hide from X, Deactivate When Last Processes Exits, and Keep File Changes In Layer (a favorite of mine). It's not in the scope of this article to introduce those features - but there have been several other articles in the past few months have talked about them and just like "Auto Run From Layer" I'm sure they'll be covered more in depth in the future.

The differences between SWVAdmin and SVSAdmin are pretty sweeping and we hoped to achieve our goal of providing an admin tool that was better organized and easier to use for both long time SVS users as well as those new to software virtualization.