The App Compat Guy

In my last post, I took a look at one specific element of the design in Windows Vista. My intention was to explore two themes that I think this one small example illustrated well: the importance of telling a consistent story well, and the importance of...

I was going to create a post about how to embed manifests into your Visual Studio solution, but Catherine Heller has already covered that topic quite thoroughly . These techniques were quite useful on XP, as you could use them to create an application...

When I'm working to resolve compatibility issues, there are always multiple options to mitigate. The solution we prefer to use is to update the code. A common application code update is this: "my application used to write files to program files. It felt...

Updated 09-February-2009: Compiled specifically targeting x86, so that you can shim this on x64 builds of Windows. Updated 18-April-2008 : I did a clean build of this on Visual Studio 2008 before posting, and I forgot about the built-in automatic manifests...

User Account Control on Windows Vista provides a convenience feature which allows you to elevate a process without leaving the current desktop. (For a discussion of why this is a convenience feature, rather than a security feature, see Mark Russinovich...

I want to digress a bit from the controls we have been drawing and measuring to talk a bit about color. In some of the examples we have been building, we have been trying to make it possible to set the color just one time rather than explicitly specifying...

I want to talk a little bit today about shims, specifically addressing how they work to address compatibility issues, and what the security ramifications are when you use a shim to address a compatibility issue. Merriam Webster defines a shim as: "a thin...

User Account Control (UAC) on Windows Vista changes the paradigm of being an administrator on a Microsoft Windows operating system. Rather than wielding full administrative privileges all of the time, the token is "split" and there are two of...

In my last post , I included the unverified claim, "I have heard (but I have not personally verified) that GDI font rendering is approximately 10x faster than GDI+ font rendering (1M glyphs / second vs. 100K glyphs / second). Of course, there is a reason...

The last time around , I suggested that you avoid using the acredir.dll shims - RedirectRegistry and RedirectFiles. As alternatives, I recommended VirtualRegistry and CorrectFilePaths. Of course, I have already gone into some details on how to use VirtualRegistry...

I have been away for a while, enjoying some of the theater in the London West End. I learned quite a few things on the trip. First, as a visit to the Duke of York's Theater proved, sitting and listening to Jeremy Irons (in Embers) is an extremely good...

I frequently run into situations where I need to configure my laptop to support some technology, without having a lot of server resources to depend on. Most recently, I configured a local instance of ADAM to support SSL. While the information on how to...

The fact that I debugged this application already has helped at least one other organization, so rather than forcing everyone to figure this out on their own, I figured I would blog about it. I worked with a customer who was using MatLab 7.1 R14 SP3....

I have an ongoing conversation with a customer whose application is now popping up a Program Compatibility Assistant dialog box, where it didn’t used to before (on either Windows Vista or Windows 7 beta). What’s going on? Well, when I cracked the resources...

I’ve run into this exact same problem 3 times now in one week, so I figure that probably doesn’t bode well and I should attempt to do something about it. With 3 different pieces of software (one of them ours), the remote control functionality is imperfectly...

Normally, I’m talking about how to fix applications here, but I want to digress and instead talk about how to help us fix things up in future versions of Windows for you. The most frequently used application fix is a version lie. We have to lie to applications...

Here is a topic I have been saying “I’ll get to it” for a while now… We’ve talked a lot about UAC here, and I have really stressed the point that standard users shouldn’t be able to affect other users or the machine itself, and if you want to violate...

I recently picked up John Robbins' excellent Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications and was flipping through it to discover just what new things I would learn and/or remind myself of. His brilliant description of setting up a local symbol server could...

A question came up in one of the comments asking me to please define TrustedInstaller. I've talked about it before a few times, but I've never gone through and dug through the implementation in a visible way. Time to change that - and we can do so with...

I came across this problem today with a customer - Windows Resource Protection preventing ActiveX control installation on Windows Vista. First, some background. Windows Resource Protection is the feature we put in place to help keep Windows in a known...

The first major obstacle to testing an application for compatibility on Windows Vista is to actually get that software installed, and there are still some challenges remaining in achieving this. One of the issues that has popped up is with deferred custom...

I have run into a few scenarios where people want to be able to block access to Windows Explorer so that they can do something such as update the system in a machine that is otherwise publicly facing. One possibility is to create a desktop all your own...

Updated 17-Sept-2009 My friend Aaron has been trying to post a comment with his recommendation. However, it never, never, ever shows up because apparently we either don’t buy good software for our blogging system, or else the software has a personal vendetta...

I posted earlier on using VirtualRegistry to provide version lies when an application is looking for the version of the operating system in the registry instead of using one of the GetVersion APIs. I could go on and on about all of the other command line...

One of the things I notice quite a bit with the customers I work with is that they have this tendency to mitigate the risk of applications breaking by changing as little of the platform as they can. One of the areas where this strategy is challenged is...