Sliding Windows

Michael Niehaus, an IT and software development veteran with quite a long history at Microsoft, talks about his career from his early days as a mainframe system programmer to his deep involvement with Microsoft products. He describes how he moved from programming in assembly language to IT roles involving client-server models in the early days of personal computing in the 1990s. This ultimately led to his work with Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) and the Business Desktop Deployment Solution Accelerator, the latter of which evolved into the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). A significant focus of this episode is the development and evolution of deployment tools and the underlying techniques, from Kickstart to VBScript to PowerShell. Michael recalls encountering PowerShell and emphasises its potential as a powerful backend for various Microsoft products in the very early days. As strange as it may sound today, the release of Vista retrospectively represented a 'giant leap' in terms of new tools