As you might have noticed from the silence, we have moved on. Here are blogs for Vineet , Patrick , Yves and Maarten . We're working on OEM Ready lately and have our hands full. For the original Vista AppCompat issues, you can keep going to Chris ...

One of the nice things of being off-site with colleagues is that you learn interesting life enhancing tricks. Vishal taught me the Ninja t-shirt technique. I will never fold a t-shirt the same way again. Maarten

If you happen to be at Teched (or you know someone who is) we have a room setup to test your application for Vista compatibility issues. You can bring your application and we can troubleshoot it for problems. We have the debug experts from SWAT team and...

Integrity Levels result in surprising behavior. The other day I was looking at an accessibility application. Since accessibility applications need to be able to access applications that are potentially running with a MIC level of high, there is a setting...

When you inadvertently copy the complete cmd.exe to your quick launch bar instead of creating a shortcut, you get some interesting behavior on launching it elevated. Instead of good old trusted elevation prompt, we get the untrusted version. Interesting...

In some scenarios it might be necessary to know whether a process is actually being redirected or not. A case in point is for example a library that is loaded and needs to know whether the host process and the library have an identical view of the virtualized...

For some reason I had to debug LSASS (Local Security Authority Process) recently. Considering that LSASS is rather involved in the functioning of the system with respect to authorization checks, it is cumbersome to debug. The system deadlocks immediately...

I had mentioned in a previous post about handy certification tools. If that sparked your interest in getting your app certified, Microsoft is extending the offer for a refund for the cost of verification testing until the end of June. You only get a refund...

This little snippet compiled with .Net 1.1: using System; using System.Diagnostics;     class Program {     static void Main(string[] args)     {         try         {             Process c = Process.GetCurrentProcess(); ...

If you get     error C2065: 'TOKEN_LINKED_TOKEN' : undeclared identifier     when you try to compile a VC++ project that needs to get the linked token through GetTokenInformation, you need to get the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Vista . This...

If you add an application to the Run key in the registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run), you'll notice that its threads are kept at Normal priority. You can call SetThreadPriority all day long, but it won't make a difference: the...

In the lab we get a lot of questions about the Vista Certification logo program. There are two different logos you can get for your product: Works With Windows Vista This one is easy to get and everyone is recommended to go for this logo. Your app needs...

In his blog post "PsExec, User Account Control and Security Boundaries" Mark Russinovich shares some insight on the capabilities of UAC in Vista... ..." It should be clear then, that neither UAC elevations nor Protected Mode IE define new Windows security...

In the LoRIE doc for developers , it is mentioned that you can register your application as a broker with Internet Explorer by adding entries to:     HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy Unfortunately IE doesn't pick...

As stated in the MSDN article that all Keys under HKLM\Software are virtualized, there is still the HKLM\Software\ODBC\ODBC.INI key (For creating System DSNs) that will NOT be virtualized. The rationale behind this was that – Creating a System DSN would...

In Vista the CSIDL as used in SHGetFolderPath are no longer the way to go . The recommended APIs such as SHGetKnownFolderPath take a KNOWNFOLDERID or actually a REFKNOWNFOLDERID. If you're wondering where those are defined and can't find them, well, I...

As mentioned in the cookbook , 16 bit applications are not going to work on 64 bit Vista. This is nothing new: they didn't run on 64 bit XP or 64 bit Windows Server 2003 either. They are still running as usual on 32 bit Vista. There is however one change...

The Cookbook mentions Networking: Kernel Mode IP Helper APIs . If you wonder where you can find them, they are the same as the usermode APIs. Only difference is the header. Instead of compiling against #include "iphlpapi.h", you compile against #include...

When you add a manifest you need to make sure that you give it the right resource type. If for some reason your manifest is not being picked up and you've ruled out fusion caching , then make sure that you don't have this: But this: The first...

Under Vista you might get this error when you create a COM component ( 800700EA ERROR_MORE_DATA). Most likely the cause of your problem is that the registry for your CLSID is messed up. You can check by starting RegEdit and navigating to the CLSID. In...

When you have an application without a manifest and you try to elevate it with an external manifest , you might get frustrated and get to the conclusion that this external manifest thing is flaky at best. The scenario goes something like this. You...

Mark and Manmeet appeared on the .Net show last week. Enjoy: http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/episode.aspx?xml=theshow/en/episode059/manifest.xml Maarten

This week we again had the honor of getting the expert advise of one of the Windows Installer PMs ( here and here ). He mentioned that when uninstalling a signed msi package you still get the scary this-package-is-unsigned dialog. Reason is that the installer...

For some reason it was quite common to use an undocumented (and hence unsupported and we-can-pull-rug-underneath-at-any-time) export from the appwiz.cpl called newlinkhere. This export was removed in Vista. Since this was quite a popular export (live...

Session 0 isolation is not limited to NT services. It also applies to COM+ server applications and COM out-of-process applications running under anything else than the interactive user. So all problems related to services living in a different Terminal...