The App Compat Guy

One great new feature in WinFX / Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) is the ability to render true drop shadows using the DropShadowBitmapEffect class . What do I mean by true shadows? It's relatively straightforward to simply render text twice onto...

There is a lot of information that we have disseminated regarding UAC applying to applications, but not nearly as much regarding control panel applets. They are, indeed, quite similar. Just like a standard .exe, a .cpl file could have one of many possible...

Every now and again, I bump up against a setup application (it's almost always a setup application) that tries to drop older versions of protected operating system files. It's fairly easy to mitigate, but I thought I would go through some of the mechanics...

A while back, I write about the Correct File Paths shim . Since that time, I've heard from a number of folks who are using the shim, helping them to configure the command line to fix applications (with the most common explanation being to "quote the pairs...

Just to save you a search and a few clicks (and to save me time later), here are the versions of Java which support Windows 7: 1.4: >= 1.4.2_23 1.5: >= 1.5.0_21 1.6: >= 1.6.0_14 If you have an application which comes with its own JVM, you should...

I figured this day would come, and to be honest, I'm a little bit surprised it took as long as it did for me to run into this in the wild. But this week, I finally came across an installer that somebody had devised which would check to see if UAC was...

When investigating application compatibility issues on Windows Vista, a significant percentage of the failures that I debug are not failures with the platform itself, but rather applications that would have failed as a standard user on Windows XP or earlier...

I ran into an interesting problem this week trying to get a legacy application running on Windows Vista. If you ran the installer, it would fail, claiming that it was unable to register a required component. So, I grabbed the ocx it was trying to install...

Earlier today, I received this request from a customer: This ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=07fb0bd8-f390-458d-a629-6f0258ac7cdf ) is a .NET 1.1 app and I have installed .NET 1.1 SP1 on Windows 7 32-bit and all .NET 1.1 SP1...

One of the features that we pried away from Windows for Windows 7 is Windows Mail. You can, of course, install Windows Live Mail to get the evolution of the same product, another mail reader of your choosing, or just use web based mail – it’s not as if...

One of the most common questions I get while working with enterprise customers is: should I leave Compatibility View turned on for the Local Intranet zone? We have an awful lot of guidance that seems to be pushing for standards, standards, standards everywhere...

Last time around, we looked at an application compatibility side-effect of User Account Control on Windows Vista: the potential impact on Mapped Network Drives when running elevated. Another side-effect that may affect application compatibility is the...

A little while ago, I was investigating the customer experience data on elevations which we use to identify which applications are triggering the greatest number of elevation prompts on Windows Vista (and hopefully do something about it). Working with...

A question came up today: Are any event logs produced when you run an application with applied shims? I've tried different variations of shims trying to get the desired results with no luck. It's probably UE, but I can't tell if the shims are erroring...

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...

One of the features of Windows that (to me at least) seems to get comparatively little attention are manifests. If you are not familiar with manifests, they are XML files that communicate with the loader to express certain bits of metadata. Manifests...

There are a large number of tools available to assist you with application compatibility, and part of the challenge of becoming an app compat ninja is to understand how to apply each of these tools in the most effective way. I spoke last time about leveraging...

In an earlier post , I began having a conversation around how shims work. I wanted to supplement some of the discussion of internals with useful information on how specifically to use shims to address problems which you may discover in the software you...

In my last entry , I provided some code to convert from the HSB color space to the RGB color space. Note that we are actually referring to the HSL color space, not the HSB color space. I am using the name HSB because this is the convention used by...

This was brought to my attention by a recent acquaintance : heaths dropped some bits on his blog that will dump the contents of an arbitrary shim database (including the system shim database) into an XML file for parsing and manipulation. I think this...

Genetic Programming is a fascinating field of study. Essentially, this is the study of software that writes software, selecting the software it has written that exhibits the highest degree of fitness, and allowing this software to continue to evolve over...

In my previous posts, I have been arguing the point that throwing away source code and starting over from scratch is a notably bad idea in general. In this, I am echoing what Joel Spolsky says so eloquently in his post Things You Should Never Do . ...

Flipping through my archives, I noticed that I haven’t really spoken a lot about Internet Explorer app compat. Since moving people off of IE6 to IE8 is a pretty big corporate priority right now (trust me, the grass really is greener over here), I figured...

When talking about application compatibility and mitigations, virtualization is almost always mentioned as part of the discussions. This could be machine virtualization or application virtualization . And, to tell you the truth, the application virtualization...

(Wow, I’m doing a lot more posting today than normal. Things kind of piled up while I was on leave.) There is a ton of activity going on in the world regarding Windows 7 deployments, and one of the hottest topics we’re finding is x64. People are very...