Getting Ready for Windows Vista? Checkout the new Firewall
There's a lot of excitement brewing around the next release of Windows, and one area that has received a huge facelift (not just from a look and feel, but across the board) is the Windows Firewall. Not only was it built on the new Windows Filtering Platform (WFP), it adds support for inbound and outbound filtering, is easier to manage, and has a brand new MMC snap-in that brings together the policy config and admin for both the firewall and IPsec into a single interface and set of Group Policies.
Checkout the latest edition of "The Cable Guy" to learn more about what's coming:
There's also a great article by Mitch Tulloch up on O'Reilly's WindowsDevCenter site about how the IPsec capabilities have improved in Windows Vista:
If you're beta testing Windows Vista, be sure to pop open the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security snap-in and take these new and enhanced features for a test drive! We'd love to hear your feedback.
Please note: The Windows Firewall Control Panel will look the same as Windows XPSP2 ro Windows Server 2003 SP1. The new stuff is in the MMC snap-in.