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I'm assuming that this initial admin step is due to the plethora of edge cases in Windows that exist when it comes to symbolic links (old APIs being the most probable cause, but there may be issues in the current FS permissions model). If MS just enable this functionality now, with no extra steps required, in the main stream release, then they will leave themselves open to a bunch of potential security issues and nasty bugs.

Hopefully they'll act on the feedback of the insider-track release users, and those enabling developer mode in the more stable releases, and this will iron out the vast majority of problems before they just enable it by default for all users.

I know this means enterprise users and main-stream (non insider-track) users will be stuck without this functionality (obviously available in unix land for decades) for a while yet, but I'd rather MS rolled this out in a responsible manner rather than just open the flood-gates of potential malware. Symlinks may be basic, but they have been the cause of many nasty vulnerabilities in Linux over the years. Hopefully MS is just being cautious and in a year or so all Windows users will be able to create symlinks without any admin interjection at all.




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