Summary

In this chapter, you have seen how new features such as Group Policy-based Administrative Templates and Software Installation interact with and use Registry. The chapter explored how the Windows Installer and MSI packages work together to install applications to the registry and file system in both system and user security contexts. Introduced is the installer token, a new way of representing a path to an assigned or published executable or DLL. The chapter then explained how the installer token works with the Explorer shell and COM to inform the Installer service that AD contains the information needed. Finally, Group Policy-based Class Store was reviewed, a kind of centralized version of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT that lets you publish COM class registrations in AD.