I almost hate to say it, but the more I use Vista for my day-to-day work the more I hate it less. Yes, that was a lot of small hates.

Vista now supports symbolic/hard links like POSIX systems do (*nix, bsd, etc). This is amazing, as I use them like crazy on my Ubuntu and Leopard machines.

It's as easy as:

C:\>mklink /d bar c:\windows

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link

I stumbled upon this while trying to set up the Zune software and iTunes (on Leopard) to pull from the same music library ... on yet another machine. On Leopard, I simply put a symlink to where my music library is mapped, so it looked something like this:

$/Users/jimmy>ln -s /Volumes/jimmy/Music/iTunes Music/iTunes

This requires I have my shared library mounted to that volume already, so I created a little automator script to mount smb://jimmy-zeus/jimmy to /Volumes/jimmy.

In Vista, this is simply one step. You can make the symlink directly to a SMB file-share! (Please someone correct me if you can do this in *nix ... I'll promise to feel like an idiot =P).

C:\Users\jimmysch>mklink /D iTunes \\jimmy-zeus\jimmy\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

Pretty freakin' cool!

[Update] Ok, maybe SMB file-share symlinks aren't so cool; as explorer.exe doesn't understand them and will hang the UI if the server doesn't respond right away when navigating to a folder with ANY SMB SYMLINK'd FOLDERS! And if you don't have access to the server ... you must wait for the 60 second timeout to get control of the window again. Ugh. Use wisely ...