Tips for Windows developers
We had a customer in the lab recently and they were quite certain their application was Windows 7 ready. To their surprise, it had several issues in certain situations. In this post, I’ll talk about one of the situations they encountered as well as other stumbling blocks you might run into with UAC Virtualization. Why … Read moreTales of Application Compatibility Weirdness – Demystifying UAC Virtualization
Recently, someone asked me this question in e-mail — “How do I get my application to run elevated when someone launches it?” Instinctively, I responded with a “You need to manifest it.” I got a nice long e-mail in return. 😉 I quickly realized that application manifests appear simple but are quite confusing. Manifests are … Read moreAnswers to Several Application Manifest Mysteries and Questions
I had the opportunity to go to Berlin for TechEd Europe 2009. I delivered a presentation on Application Compatibility and the rest of the time I hung out in the “Test your app on Win 7” and “Win 7 Developer drop in center”. I got some great questions from attendees. I thought I’d blog some … Read moreQuestions from the Developer Booth at TechEd Europe 2009
If you have an existing application, you may be wondering if it’s going to work on Windows 7. If it works on Vista, you have a good shot at it working on Windows 7. As a developer or a tester, you may be wondering if you have tested your application to uncover potential issues on … Read moreWindows 7 Application Compatibility Testing Guidance document
I had written a draft of this post a while ago (last year). I use Live Writer as my blog editor. Between Live Writer and Intellimirror,this draft has survived multiple reloads of interim builds of Windows 7. So, I think in some ways, it deserves to be resurrected and posted. :-) Here’s the post with … Read moreDisplaying the UAC consent dialog on the desktop
I know I could talk all day about application compatibility topics and not cover everything that can be discussed. Here’s a one hour webcast I did that focuses on the top issues and most confusing topics for Application Compatibility. I do some of my favorite demos showing UAC architecture, data redirection, services isolation, and mandatory … Read moreDeveloping Compatible Applications for Windows 7 webcast
I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been helping out with a couple other programs we have going on in the labs these days. OEM Ready is a subset of Certified for Windows Vista targeted at applications that ship on new PC’s. If you are using the automation in the OEM Ready Certification Test Tool, … Read moreOEM Ready Test Case 1 Incorrectly Fails with a UTF-8 manifest
If you use the ATL Server performance counter libraries, you may run into a problem on Vista and WS08. The ATL libraries don’t play well with the updates to Windows Resource Protection. WRP enforces restrictions on the registry to prevent corruption of performance counters. ATL breaks these rules and tries to update the registry directly. … Read moreRegistering ATL Performance Counters on Vista and Server 2008
In the compatibility labs, we always give an big overview presentation about Windows application compatibility. There’s a lot of overlap between Vista and WS08 AppCompat but we call out some specific areas that mostly affect WS08. We’ve recorded the WS08 specific section of the presentation and posted it to Channel 9. I hope you find … Read moreWindows Server 2008 Application Compatibility presentation
I think there is always a nugget of information that inspires a blog. This is the idea that inspired my blog. By default, Windows Server 2008 has no server roles installed. This isn’t intended to make you do more work (it’s a feature). The goal is to be secure by default. After the OS installed, … Read moreDetecting what Server Roles are installed on Windows Server 2008