Vista to get symlinks?

A long time in coming, the next version of Windows may get something people in the NIX world have been taking for granted for a long time: symlinks. Technically this is SMB2.0 and NTFS that we are talking about, which is part of the Vista/Longhorn Server package. This may not seem like a big deal to most, but in reality it is a big deal. In any shared computing environment where you have multiple people accessing a single system, symlinks can make administration of a server and individual user data vastly less complex than having to manage hundreds of shares. Although details aren't completely available yet, from the way it sounds, symlinks for Windows will behave the same way they do in Linux, a transparent way of accessing another file or filesystem object from anywhere. Likely this same functionality will carry over to WinFS, when it is released.