Shut Up, Laura

(With much thanks to Darren Mar-elia for digging up an answer I'd been looking for without success.)

As you probably know, the down-level Client-Side Extensions for Group Policy Preferences have shipped, and are deployable via WSUS. I was dancing a happy dance when this happened, as I think that GP Preferences are what we've all hoped that GP would be all along, but it had never quite gotten there until now.

So I go to deploy the CSE at %Now-Former-Employer%¹, only to find the following:

The GPP CSEs, which are deployable via WSUS, have a dependency on XMLLite, which can not be deployed via WSUS.

A bit of left-hand/right-hand confusion? Who knows. But the XMLLite dependency is mitigated as follows, according to Darren:

• Windows Server 2003 SP2 and Windows XP SP3 have XMLLite built-in
• 2K3 SP1 and XP SP2 will only get XMLLite if you install IE7. (%Now-Former-Employer%¹ is still standardized on IE6, thus creating the issue in this case.)

I imagine it would be possible to roll up a custom MSI and deploy via GP/SMS/whatever to do the trick if you don't want to bang out IE7, or maybe MSFT will address the "No XMLLite via WSUS" thing.  I'd like to see the latter happen, as it strikes me as one of those things that I would expect to "just plain work^TM," and the fact that it doesn't might slow adoption of GPP in down-level environments.

Which would be a real shame. GPP is a killer app for anyone whose name isn't joe Richards.  :-)

[1] More on this later.