Head on over to Richard Smith's blog to get GImageX. GImageX is a GUI for imageX. The original verison was written in AutoIT but this version has been completely rewritten in C++. The new version v2.0.1 BETA feature list on Richard's site:

• Native x86 and x64 versions entirely written in C++.  Tiny ~100KB executable.
• Doesn’t use the imagex.exe utility at all – instead it uses the WIMGAPI interface (the wimgapi.dll file from the imagex directory)
• Progress bars, time elapsed, time remaining, file counts have been added
• Clean “abort” option
• Ability to mount, change and get info on WIM images

So what are you waiting for, click here to get it.

Microsoft Deployment is the next version of BDD and the final version can be download here.

The brief from MS Dowloads:
Microsoft Deployment is the next version of Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007. It is the recommended process and toolset to automate desktop and server deployment. Microsoft Deployment provides detailed guidance and job aids for every organizational role involved with large-scale deployment projects.

You may have read an article by Ben Hunter on sorting the applications in BDD so they are easier to find when adding them to the Task Sequencer of Database Role. The article can be found here.

An issue arose the other day that necessitated the re-ordering of application in BDD. The current build process that I am working on uses Windows Powershell to do a lot of post build customizations. In testing we found that Powershell was being installed before the .Net Framework. This seemed odd to me as we are using a role to installed our Tier 1 application.

After looking into the issue a bit more it seems that BDD does not honour the order of application defined in the role but installs them in the order they are listed in Applications.xml. This was a problem for us so I set about extending the bddsort application so I could specify any order I wanted. Hence BDD Application Sorter was born.

The program is simple to use, all you need to do is open the Applications.xml file, re-order the application and save the file again. I make a back of Applications.xml just in case but I have never had an issue with the program to date.

Anyway, BDD Application Sorter is attached below. Enjoy!

BBDAppsSort.zip (13.74 KB)

Update: New Version to support Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

The version below will work for the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
MDTAppSort.zip (23.44 KB)