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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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The Windows SDK Breaks the New TR1 Extensions in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Until you Repair It, That Is)
One of the main uses for my blog is to share those little annoyances that I spend hours or days solving and spare you the “fun” of going through this yourself. So, even though this isn’t really about application compatibility, which has kind of become Read More...
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...
10 Minute Demos of Windows Vista Deployment Topics
I haven't seen these pop up yet - if you're looking for a quick demo of several of the tools available to assist in a Windows Vista deployment, you may enjoy the following 10 minute demos: http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/6/9/D6943262-EF5A-4733-8247-9BF7A6FEF299/Application_Compatibility_Demo.wmv Read More...
The Windows Vista Compatibility Center
It's been a couple of months since we released the Windows Vista Compatibility Center , and while I meant to discuss it at the time, it's still worth a little chat. I talk quite a bit about the tools to test for application compatibility, sharing debugging Read More...
Announcing ACT 5.0.3 (a.k.a. ACT 5.0.5428.1080)
It seems like just yesterday I was posting about ACT 5.0.2 being released, but we just released ACT 5.0.3 . Now, I've had a couple of people confused about the version numbers we talk about, and what they actually see. For, rather unfortunately, you didn't Read More...
What is the TrustedInstaller Entity You See in Windows Vista?
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 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...
Getting (Some) Virtualization Data from the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool
If you run the Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator on Windows Vista, you get back some data when an ActiveX control tries to write to a file that a standard user used to be able to write to. However, that data doesn't show up when you are using Read More...
Per-User COM Registrations and Elevated Processes with UAC on Windows Vista SP1 Part 2: OLE Automation
Here's an interesting lesson which, quite honestly, I haven't thought about for a while. But it turns out it's rather important. A little over a month ago, I talked about a change to Windows Vista in SP1 regarding per-user COM registration , indicating Read More...
The Windows Client TechCenter
About a month ago (can you tell I'm a little behind?) we launched the Windows Client TechCenter. My little corner of the site (which is technically at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/aa905066.aspx but it's easier to remember http://technet.com/appcompat 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...
Springboard Live! Real Talk about Windows Vista
At TechEd last week, I had the opportunity to sit on a panel of bloggers and answer any and all questions people wanted to come and throw at us. We had a mixture of pre-submitted questions and audience questions, and overall it was great fun. Joining 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...
Debugging Without a Debugger: The Magic of wercon and a Web Browser
Last week, I was at TechEd 2008: IT Professionals in Orlando, FL. (More on that later.) I had the opportunity to talk to lots of people, and it is always a great learning experience for me. Along the way, I even had a chance to solve an application compatibility Read More...
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