with the integrated Windows Disc Image Burner utility. (This capability also exists in Windows 8, as you’d expect.) But you couldn’t browse into them as you would with a physical disk.
Now you can.
Windows 8 automatically mounts both ISO and VHD files so that they become, in effect, part of the PC’s filesystem, just as with any other attached storage device. For example, when you plug a USB hard drive into your PC, it may become the E: drive, or whatever. So it is with both ISO and VHD files: Simply by opening such a file—by double-clicking it with the mouse, say—it becomes part of the filesystem and immediately picks up the next available drive letter.
Let’s see how this works.
If you double-click on an ISO file in Windows 8, two things happen. First, a new Explorer window opens, letting you browse into the contents of the file as if it were a physical storage device. And second, a new virtual optical drive is mounted in the filesystem and given the next available drive letter. Both of these things can be seen in Figure 4-33.
Figure 4-33: ISO files work just like any other storage device in Windows 8.
This is, in fact, the primary reason that Windows 8 offers this capability: It allows you to run the Setup application from an ISO file without first burning the file to disc.
Because an ISO file works like physical storage, it can be used like any other storage device. You can navigate through its virtual directory structure using File Explorer, copy files out as needed, and even run applications contained within the file. This means, for example, that you no longer need to burn an ISO file to disc if you don’t want to. Instead, you can just mount it in the filesystem and run whatever Setup or other applications it contains.
You can also mount an ISO file by right-clicking and choosing Mount from the context menu.
Want to burn an ISO to disc? Right-click the file and choose Burn to disc.
You may have noticed that an ISO file creates a new tab in Explorer when the file is mounted. This Disk Tools: Drive tab is of more use for other types of drives, but for an ISO file it’s pretty much there to provide a way to eject—really, unmount—the ISO. This will remove the ISO from the filesystem, along with its drive letter.
VHD files work similarly to ISO files in Windows 8, and offer other unique virtualization-related capabilities. However, there is one subtle but important difference. Whereas an ISO file is treated as a removable disc when it is mounted, a VHD file is treated as a fixed hard disk.
When you double-click a VHD file in Windows 8, a new drive letter is added to Explorer, just as with an ISO file, but it appears as a fixed disk, not a removable disk. You can see this in Figure 4-34, where the VHD appears next to the PC’s main storage device (which is typically a hard drive or SSD).
Okay, so you may be thinking: So what? The icon’s different, but you can still navigate around in the VHD as you do with an ISO, and of course use all the standard file management actions you can with physical storage or ISO files. But there is an important distinction to mounting a VHD vs. an ISO: With a VHD, you get the full suite of Windows 8 disk utilities to work with.
Figure 4-34: VHD files mount as fixed disks in Windows 8: Here, Drive G: is a VHD, not a physical hard disk.
To see what this means, open File Explorer, navigate to the Computer view and select the VHD. As you can see in Figure 4-35, the Disk Tools: Drive ribbon tab is now fully enabled, providing access to advanced capabilities, such as BitLocker, disk optimization and cleanup, format, and more.
Figure 4-35: VHDs offer many more options than ISO files.
That said, you can still eject a mounted VHD just as you do with ISO: Right-click and choose Eject, or select Eject from the Disk Tools: Drive tab in the Explorer ribbon.
Managing Classic Windows Applications
While Windows does offer some basic applications and, in Windows 8, some new Metro-style apps as well, most Windows users will want to install a number of more full-featured Windows applications, such as Microsoft Office, as well. And while Microsoft is moving inexorably to a future of Metro-style apps, Windows 8 also works with traditional (one might say, “old-fashioned”) Windows applications almost exactly like its predecessors. But there have been a handful of improvements in this area, so we’ll discuss the changes in this section.
Configuring Desktop Applications
From a compatibility perspective, Windows 8 works just like Windows 7, though you can now use the built- in Application Compatibility tools to emulate Windows 7 if needed. But from our regular usage of Windows 8, it’s pretty obvious that little in the way of compatibility work will be required, and if you have an application that works with Windows 7, it should work fine with Windows 8 as well.
Of course, with the move to a Metro-like user experience, Windows 8 users will need to deal with a few Metro-related nuances when it comes to working with classic desktop applications. And the big two, in our experience, involve file associations and the pinning of applications to the Metro-style Start screen.
Most Windows users are probably familiar with the notion of file associations, where various applications are known to be compatible with different file types and Windows provides an interface by which you can select which of those applications is used by default. Likewise, Windows has long supported an Open With functionality that lets you override the default file association on the fly and use a different application. This latter capability is usually accessed by a right-click context menu such as the one shown in Figure 4-36. Here, we’re overriding the default file association for .jpg picture files and opening them with Windows Photo Viewer instead.
This functionality works as it did in Windows 7. But there is one major difference in this version of the OS: Windows 8 supports both new, Metro-style apps as well as classic Windows applications. So it’s possible that the list of applications you could use to open a file will contain a mix of both Metro and desktop applications. And aside from Open With, which works as an Explorer extension as before, the interfaces you use to configure file associations are now Metro-based.
Figure 4-36: Overriding a file association with Open With
There are two key times you’ll run into these new interfaces. When you install a new application that tries to associate itself with various file types, Windows 8 will display a notification toast, like the one in Figure 4-37, alerting you that there are new file association choices to make.
Figure 4-37: The new file association notification toast
Figure 4-38: The new Metro-style file association interface
If you click the toast, you’ll be presented with a window similar to the one shown in Figure 4-38. (It will, of
