Whatís New with Wireless in Vista?

Microsoft has designed Windows Vista to provide better support for wireless networking that is more closely integrated with the operating system than ever before.This has resulted in improved stability and reliability.In 2001,wireless networking wasnít prevalent;therefore,Windows XP didnít support it natively.You could use wireless network cards with XP but what you got was typically a proprietary interface from the hardware vendor.This meant that when enterprises implemented wireless local area networks (WLANs) their IT departments would have to learn different vendor-speci?c wireless
software depending on the computer hardware they used.Windows Vista provides a single wireless client that,regardless of the computerís manufacturer,is consistent for users and IT personnel. The new Native Wi-Fi Architecture in Windows Vista has been redesigned.Now 802.11 is rep- resented as its own media type in Windows,separate from 802.3,which now allows features such as larger frame sizes to be taken advantage of.Wireless support in Windows Vista also includes the fol- lowing changes:
The Single Sign-on feature Behavior change with no preferred wireless network available
Hidden wireless network support
Command-line con?guration
WPA2 support
Integration with NAP
Other changes with wireless support can be found in Windows Vista,such as the Network
Diagnostics Framework,Network Location Types,and the next generation of TCP/IP to name a few.
These also apply to general networking and were covered in Chapter 6.Therefore,weíll focus on
those changes specific to wireless.
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