It’s finally here!

We released the Windows 7 Compatibility Center a few weeks ago. This lets you look up one application at a time. You can find that at http://windows.com/compatibility.

Today, we have a downloadable list indicating vendor support. If you want to write some automated matching against your list of application, you can use this – it is an Excel download of all known information from vendors. You can find that at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890e522e-e39e-4278-aebc-186f81e29173&displaylang=en.

The final step will be to have this information integrated directly into ACT. The target date for this integration is mid-December 2009. We’re getting there! We’re also planning to keep this data updated bi-weekly.

Enjoy!

We shipped ACT 5.5 back in April 2009, several months before we shipped Windows 7. Helpfully (I guess) we decided to label it Windows 7 RC in the UI so you could specifically track your testing against the release candidate. We had the idea that we could update this via our web service, so that once we hit RTM we could just push out an update to modify this.

And apparently we forgot to turn this little bit of code on.

So, now we have a bunch of folks around the world who wonder why ACT seems to be in a beta phase and not ready for Windows 7 RTM.

Well, it is ready for Windows 7 RTM, and I bet some of you would like it to look ready. We’re really sorry we can’t do that using the mechanisms we planned to use, so I figured I’d let you in on the secret to the planned update.

We were going to update 2 fields in the database.

So, if you want your ACT UI to look ready for the future present, you can run this bit of SQL:

UPDATE dbo.OS
SET osName='Windows 7'
WHERE osName='Windows 7 RC'
GO
UPDATE dbo.OS
SET osName='Windows Server 2008 R2'
WHERE osName='Windows Server 2008 R2 RC'
GO

Enjoy, and sorry for the inconvenience.