The lock icon has returned. All hail the lock icon!!!
We have just released Vault 2010 Update 1. It contains several improvements and fixes, but I want to focus on the lock icon for this post. The meaning has changed a bit since Vault 2009, and I want to make sure that developers understand the change. 
In Vault 2009, the lock icon meant that the file was in the locked state. It was basically a bit on the File object. A File would either be locked or not locked, and there were API functions to change the locked state. The locked state could be read from the Locked property of the File object.
In Vault 2010, we decided to remove the locked state of a file in favor of ACL permissions. The lock icon was removed from the Vault client. At the API level, File.Locked still existed but it always returned false.
Now with Vault 2010 Update 1, we added the lock icon back to the client. However the meaning is different than before. A lock icon now means that the current user has read only permissions based on the ACL of the file. So the concept of a locked file is still gone in favor of ACL permissions. At the API level, File.Locked will now return true if the user does not have write permissions. Otherwise false is returned.
Long live the lock icon!
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