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This post corrects an error from a previous post. Back when I was explaining the changes in the operating system layers for Windows 7 , I incorrectly described the AdditiveRunAsHighest. Since RunAsHighest is already confusing enough, and AdditiveRunAsHighest
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A little while back, those of us who explain application compatibility for a living and try to help people get their arms around it ran up against those who implement it in the product on the scale of … the whole earth. Those of us who explain things
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I have had the Stock Viewer Shim Demo application available for over a year now, and I'm delighted at how much impact it has had. I see people using this all the time! But previously it was available only in English. Well, no more - it has now been (mostly)
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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
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ComputerWorld did a story on shims featuring my session from TechEd North America – check it out: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9133382
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Those of you who write application installers using Windows Installer may have noticed a bit of a change in the behavior of version checking in Windows 7 – if you happen to be doing your version checking from a custom action. Let’s have a look. If you’d
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It’s visible in the beta, but I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about this externally. Regardless, I wanted to shed some light on what happened, and add a bit of the human perspective behind the decision. If you inspect the operating system layers
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I’m still catching up with requests to talk about stuff – here’s one that came in back in June (and just came again today from somebody else): “MoveIniToRegistry clearly requires parameters, but there's no documentation defining what these are.
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The same question came up two times in 26 minutes (on the same discussion list, no less), so I figured I’d answer it once here as that seems a reasonable indicator that others may have the same question. What is the deal with shimming on Windows Vista
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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
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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
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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..."
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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
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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
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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,
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