When one launches an administrative tool locally... one has good cause to expect it to list local resources automatically that the tool cares about right?

Not so it seems with the DFS (Distributed File System) MMC applet.

Over the weekend when working on my new add-in I was making use of NetDfsAddStdRoot() as well as a couple of other DFS calls and ran into an oddity... when I create a DFS root in the MMC applet... it shows up, however when I create one with NetDfsAddStdRoot() it doesn't, nor does it show up if you right click in the list and choose refresh.

Granted, this may not sound like a huge issue... only Windows limits you to a single DFS root, which means if I create one programmatically and then the user tries to create their own manually in the MMC... they are going to get an error and there will be no obvious way to get around it.

Sounds like a bug doesn't it? Possibly (and likely unrelated to this one), and there is a way around it... you just have to be explicit and add the root or server to the DFS MMC which is a nice thing to know which means I can remove the notice from my add-in about how you shouldn't uninstall it without first using it’s build in 'remove configuration' button.

I don't have a (VPC) Windows Server 2008 server handy but will see if this behavior is the same under it, if so I'll bug it on connect and see what they say as call me crazy... but a management tool when run locally should display local resources in cases when standalone authentication is not necessary (ie SQL) and enumeration of the resources are not prohibitively expensive.

Read the complete post at http://ihatelinux.blogspot.com/2007/10/dfs-oddity.html