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Chris Jackson's Semantic Consonance

Windows Application Compatibility in the Real World

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  • Chris Jackson is an Architect and the Technical Lead for the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team.

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CorrectFilePaths Has to Point to a Directory Which Exists
A question came up via comments. (I was going to say that it came up recently, but another glance reveals that it came up in, oh, June. I don’t think I can fairly call that recent…) “…the fix seems only to work if the directory structure exists…” This Read More...
CompatAdmin How Do I Shim Thee? Let Me Count The Ways...
When you come across issues debugging applications, there are typically several ways to solve them. Today, I'm going to pick on our own stuff and throw a few different shims at it. Interestingly enough, what I'm going to be shimming up will be the tool Read More...
How Long Can the Command Line Argument Be for a Shim on Windows Vista?
I had a comment come up on an earlier post : "FYI, I've hit a limitation with CorrectFilePaths - the maximum amount of data that can be entered in the parameter field is 512 bytes - not enough to fix more than 2 files under "Program Files" unfortunately..." Read More...
Putting It All Together: Using My Ramblings to Solve Real Problems
I send out a lot of links to my articles in response to questions that come up, but the other day I had a chance to use a pile of them to solve a fairly complicated problem end to end. So, I figured I'd share how we can piece together all of this knowledge Read More...
Documentation Update for the Application Compatibility Toolkit
Last week, we updated the documentation for the Application Compatibility Toolkit. It's kind of hidden, though - if you go to the Application Compatibility Toolkit download page , you will find a new item in the list of files: ACT50_Doc_Update_Installation_Instructions.zip Read More...
Resolve Issues with Windows Resource Protection using the WRPMitigation Shim
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, Read More...
Modifying Directory ACLs with the OpenDirectoryAcl Shim
I received a request to talk about a particular shim. And yes, I received that request over a month ago, so ... sorry about that. Nonetheless, I've managed to scratch out a little niche of time to discuss the shim: OpenDirectoryAcl Yep, this does exactly Read More...
Enabling Diagnostic Output from Shims
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 Read More...
Applying Shims (Compatibility Fixes) to Child Processes Using Layers (Compatibility Modes)
A comment came up on a recent posting regarding modules, inquiring about processes. Specifically: Do these included/excluded modules have to be in the same process, or can they include other processes too? (I have an application that calls multiple child Read More...
System Shim Database Entries: They May Not Work, and How To Modify Them If They Don't
I received one comment on my recent blog post on copying from the system shim database, which I think is worthy of discussion as I have heard similar questions before: I have found previously (under Windows XP, haven't attempted under Vista) that some Read More...
Why You Don't Need to Copy and Paste from the System Shim Database (And What Happens If You Do Anyway)
I hear about a bug now and again with Compatibility Administrator [CompatAdmin]. It always surprises me when I hear about the bug, because you can only hit it if you are trying to do something that there is no point in doing (which is why we never caught Read More...
What Modules Do I Need to Include when Configuring Shim Parameters?
A question came up in the comments of one of my posts, and I think the answer is important enough to elevate to more than just another comment (and I didn't even answer completely in that quick response). When you are configuring a shim and press the Read More...
Can You Shim Applications Virtualized in SoftGrid?
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 Read More...
The Lack of Wildcard Support for the CorrectFilePaths Shim in Windows Vista
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" Read More...
The UAC Arms Race Has Begun
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 Read More...
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