If you right click on an executable in Windows Vista, you’ll find a Compatibility Tab, where you can set compatibility modes (layers) for that executable file. These compatibility layers are collections of shims and loader flags (depending on whether they affect the loader or if they have to intercept Windows API calls throughout the lifetime of the process). However, you’ll find that you can’t do the same thing for MSI files on Windows Vista.
With Windows 7, however, you’ll find that you *are* able to apply a compatibility mode. Is this using the same mechanisms? How does it work?
To illustrate, I’m going to take the installer for Bao Nguyen’s excellent Switcher application, hack it up to break it, and then use a compatibility mode to fix it.
Before we begin, make sure you have Orca installed from the Platform SDK…
So, starting with the original installer, right click and select Edit with Orca. From the list of tables, select LaunchCondition. There are 2: one looking for the .NET Framework 2.0, and the other looking for Windows Vista or higher. (Technically, the .NET Framework check is redundant today, but in the future, that may not be true.) Take the VersionNT check, which is correctly written as a >= check, and transform it into a bad check by removing the > character. Now, it won’t install on Windows 7. (Wow – it’s strange to be breaking something instead of fixing something.) Save the modified MSI.
Before we fix it, let’s turn on logging so we can get a better view into what’s happening. Launch the group policy editor (Windows-r – gpedit.msc) and navigate to Local Computer Policy \ Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Windows Installer. In the right hand pane, double click the Logging policy. Then, change the setting to Enabled, and modify the policy accordingly. I set mine to iwearucmpvox – gets it all (why not?). Click on OK, and now you should get more data from Windows Installer.
Finally, let’s launch the application. It’s going to immediately gripe to you about the version number. If we look at the MSI logs that are generated (you’ll find them at %temp% – I sort by time to see the most recently generated MSI*.log file), you’ll find the following in the logs:
MSI (c) (8C:1C) [13:03:32:807]: Doing action: LaunchConditions
Action 13:03:32: LaunchConditions. Evaluating launch conditions
Action start 13:03:32: LaunchConditions.
This application requires Windows Vista.
Which we kind of expected, since we intentionally hacked up the MSI to fail like that. (Hey – at least we’re as good at breaking things as we are at fixing them, no? :-) )
Now let’s fix it up. Right click on the MSI, select properties, and then go to the Compatibility tab (which, in our first interesting observation, is actually present). You’ll note that only one option is enabled: running in compatibility mode for the previous version of Windows (the drop down doesn’t offer any more). And, being Windows 7, the previous version is Windows Vista. Right? Let’s find out. Select the checkbox (the dropdown contains only 1 option and is, therefore, superfluous). Now run the installer again, and – surprise! – it works again. Let’s check out what we find in the logs:
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '601'. Its new value: '600'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '0'. Its new value: '14'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: APPCOMPAT: [DetectVersionLaunchCondition] Launch condition version successfully detected.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '600'. Its new value: '601'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '14'. Its new value: '0'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding SHIMFLAGS property. Its value is '512'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding SHIMVERSIONNT property. Its value is '600'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '601'. Its new value: '600'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding SHIMSERVICEPACKLEVEL property. Its value is '14'.
MSI (c) (E8:CC) [13:05:37:999]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '0'. Its new value: '14'.
Cool – so we have baked in APPCOMPAT to go through and change the version number to get to the previous version of Windows. Good, right? Well, good if your application is checking for Windows Vista. But the challenge that kept many people from deploying Windows Vista is compatibility with Windows XP – what happens when installers target Windows XP?
Well, it kind of depends on whether Previous version of Windows means the previous version of Windows (Windows Vista) or a previous version of Windows (Windows XP, Windows 2000, etc.). How do we find out?
Hack up that launch condition again!
Go back into Orca, and change the VersionNT check to be = 501 (Windows XP). Save it, and try launching it again. (You’ll have to uninstall the old one first and then install again.) What happens?
Yes – it works! That’s right, we’re kind of like that person you meet in a bar, ask their name, and they respond, “what do you want it to be?” We’ll try different versions until we get one that makes the launch condition succeed. You can see it in the logs:
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '601'. Its new value: '600'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '0'. Its new value: '14'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '14'. Its new value: '13'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '13'. Its new value: '12'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '12'. Its new value: '11'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '11'. Its new value: '10'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '10'. Its new value: '9'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '9'. Its new value: '8'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '8'. Its new value: '7'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '7'. Its new value: '6'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '6'. Its new value: '5'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '5'. Its new value: '4'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '4'. Its new value: '3'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '3'. Its new value: '2'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '2'. Its new value: '1'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '1'. Its new value: '0'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '600'. Its new value: '502'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '0'. Its new value: '14'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '14'. Its new value: '13'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '13'. Its new value: '12'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '12'. Its new value: '11'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '11'. Its new value: '10'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '10'. Its new value: '9'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '9'. Its new value: '8'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '8'. Its new value: '7'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '7'. Its new value: '6'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '6'. Its new value: '5'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '5'. Its new value: '4'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '4'. Its new value: '3'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '3'. Its new value: '2'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '2'. Its new value: '1'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '1'. Its new value: '0'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '502'. Its new value: '501'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '0'. Its new value: '14'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: APPCOMPAT: [DetectVersionLaunchCondition] Launch condition version successfully detected.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '501'. Its new value: '601'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '14'. Its new value: '0'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding SHIMFLAGS property. Its value is '512'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding SHIMVERSIONNT property. Its value is '501'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying VersionNT property. Its current value is '601'. Its new value: '501'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding SHIMSERVICEPACKLEVEL property. Its value is '14'.
MSI (c) (0C:F0) [13:50:10:634]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Modifying ServicePackLevel property. Its current value is '0'. Its new value: '14'.
Sweetness. Not only can you pass version checks, we even do all of the work for you.
You’ll also note that this is not a shim – it’s a modification of the properties (VersionNT and ServicePackLevel). This is baked right in to Windows Installer. You can still have shims affecting custom actions hosted by the msiexec process (and do – see http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/2009/05/06/why-custom-actions-get-a-windows-vista-version-lie-on-windows-7.aspx).
Now, this is more of a consumer-level fix, because consumers don’t use Orca and don’t use transforms. In the Enterprise, you can create MSI Transforms and fix it up without having to cycle through everything. But it’s still nice to be able to quickly fix something when you suspect it’s the problem. Happy fixing!
I’ve been seeing a number of reports on an error while synchronizing with ACT, with an error message indicating something along the lines of:
String was not recognized as a valid DateTime
The errors have thus far come from Germany and The Netherlands. The team has already investigated the issue – it is, indeed, a globalization bug. They have a fix in place for ACT 6.0, but for now to work around the problem you will need to change the Windows locale to English-US. Sorry for the inconvenience, but wanted to unblock those who were confused by this by sharing the workaround.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Wayne Applehans to record a session for our TechNet IT Managers “The Big Show” – it’s posted here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itmanagement/default.aspx
Here is the transcript, if you prefer to read rather than to listen:
You are listening to a Microsoft Podcast for IT professionals. For more great content please check out www.microsoft.com/podcasts.
John Baker: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone. This is John Baker for TechNet Radio. Today’s show is Wayne Applehans. He is the director of technical audience marketing at Microsoft, and he is going to be talking to Chris Jackson, who is the technical lead for the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team. And they are going to be talking about application compatibility in Windows 7.
Wayne Applehans: Hello everyone, my name is Wayne Applehans, director of technical audience marketing at Microsoft and I want to welcome you to our April edition of the Microsoft Platform Dialogue series. This is our monthly interview. We open up and talk to the experts, both inside and outside of Microsoft about the latest trends impacting IT, and the resources and guidance available to help you plan and deploy the latest Microsoft technologies.
A much anticipated topic of Windows 7 is the center of our discussion today, and joining us from Microsoft is Chris Jackson. Hey Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Jackson: I’m doing great, how are you doing?
Wayne: Great Chris. So we understand that you are the Windows 7 app compat guy. Can you give us a little bit more information about your experience? What do you do at Microsoft?
Chris: Sure. Well I am the technical lead for the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team. We’re a worldwide team that is the highest level of escalation for application compatibility issues in the enterprise, so we could go onsite to customers around the world and figure out, you know, what is it that is being a blocker in terms of application compatibility to both fix that specific problem and also bring in the organizational learning of how can we avoid other people having those same problems and share that knowledge.
Wayne: Awesome. Well we appreciate your time today helping us to break down the topic of application compatibility with Windows 7, and I know that it’s a topic that’s at the top of the mind for a lot of IT managers and IT professionals thinking about jump starting their planning process. So let’s go ahead and jump in. There’s quite a bit of buzz in the press today and in the blogosphere about Windows 7. In fact, I was in Hanover recently at the CeBit Conference and it was standing room only for the Win 7 demos. So Chris, let’s start with the big perception that’s out there today about Windows 7 really being Vista SP3, or what did you refer to it earlier today when we were talking?
Chris: What I have been referring to in my own side conversations is “The Great Vista Do Over”. Our opportunity to fix all of the things we didn’t do right on Windows Vista.
Wayne: So do you think the confidence level should actually be higher for Windows 7? What’s changed in it, as IT pros think about their migration path from XP, or if they’re on Vista, what’s changed, what’s going to help them make that leap in terms of migration and deployment?
Chris: Well I think there are several things that have changed. First of all, the passage of time itself has helped matters. When Vista first came out, we simply broke so many things, and you couldn’t buy a version that worked, that we blocked a lot of people from being able to get there at all, it was simply impossible. The ecosystem has had time to catch up to that, and thereby now you actually have an option to go buy something that works, and that’s pretty important.
Wayne: I’ve heard that the goal is for everything that worked on Windows Vista to continue working on Windows 7, which is probably somewhat unrealistic, and I’m just wondering, we know some apps are going to fail, can you give us some examples of the types of things that may regress in this process?
Chris: Sure, and you are exactly right. I mean, anytime you change code at all you have the potential for a compatibility problem because you never know what kind of things people are depending upon. So what I normally do is give two examples of software that didn’t work on certain builds of Windows 7, one of them which we addressed and another that we didn’t address directly to the operating system, we used a different technology, because I think those examples are going to showcase the decisions that we’ll make.
Let me give you an example of one that we fixed directly. If you run Microsoft Money, and I know it’s the 2008 version, and also I believe the 2007 and 2006 version, if you’ve got one of the previous released versions, if you run that on the data build, the seven thousand build, you’ll notice it pops up an error. And if you debug the error activity, which typically takes about a day or two by some of our top debuggers to figure this one out, what we eventually discovered was that the bug itself is one in the Internet Explorer controls that are being hosted by Money. And one of the buffers that it is using to pass a string around depends on you being able to overrun that buffer by two bytes, and that’s a bug that’s been in Windows since Windows 95. Someone fixed the bug and surfaced the fact that Money, and probably a lot of other apps, depend on that behavior, they expect the bug to be there. So what we had to do in the operating system to fix that is put the bug back in. So we just over allocate the string by two bytes every time you request it. So we’ve now made it so it’s no longer depending on a buffer overrun because we’ve actually allocated enough buffer memory, but it’s always over allocated to account for that software dependency.
Wayne: Wow, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of us actually knowingly putting a bug into software. That’s awesome. So if I’m an IT pro, and I just finished up a lot of work migrating to Windows Vista, what is Windows 7 going to do? What is that going to mean to me? Will I have to repeat a lot of that work? What are your thoughts on that?
Chris: Well when it comes to the work with Windows Vista, the majority of what you are doing is you’re updating it to meet the new security requirements that we began enforcing, starting with Windows Vista, things that were always in the guidelines, that you ought to do this, that this is really recommended, this is what you are supposed to do, but if you didn’t you got away with it, suddenly you couldn’t get away with it anymore, so we started enforcing those. We have not gone back on that bet at all, so all of the investments that you’ve made to get your applications working as a standard user are going to continue to pay off.
And in fact, if you are an enterprise who is using, for example, shims to keep software working without having to update the source code or buy another version, one of the greatest demos that I’ve seen done, it was actually Jeremy Chapman, one of the guys in front marketing, who took my demo app and the shim demo that I put together for our technical conferences, fixed it up in Windows Vista, took the shim database, fixing that application, dropped it in the USB key, pared it to Windows 7, installed it unchanged and the same apps continued to be fixed on Windows 7, with even shims continuing to work. So it’s just super important to us that we respect that. We can’t always do it. There are some dependencies, particularly when applications are hooking the operating system, which it’s kind of remarkable how many are. But for the most part we’re going to keep anything that’s reasonably well behaved continuing to work.
Wayne: So if you had a few minutes with an IT professional, maybe it’s the desktop support engineer or the IT manager of a mid-market company, and they were talking to you about considering an upgrade to Windows 7 in the future, what would the three things be that you’d share with them in preparing for that migration?
Chris: Well, the first thing is to be thinking about the application compatibility work that you need to do earlier rather than later. If you have a reasonably large application portfolio, I’ve seen some of the application compatibility projects take 18, sometimes even 24, months. A lot of that is simply because you have some fairly major projects to fix software along the way. Maybe you’ve started up a new development project for some internally developed software. You want to get started on things like that as early as possible. If you know today, that running as a standard user, or running as a protected administrator with UAC turned on, causes your application to have a problem, yet there’s really no reason to wait until, you know, if you’re waiting for Windows 7 RTM or even Windows 7 SP1, you shouldn’t have to wait until that shifts to start addressing those problems now to shorten that time later.
The second big recommendation is if you have people writing internal software, figure out what you want your future desktop to look like, if you want standard users, if you want to be on Windows 7, or at least Windows Vista, get your developers who are writing software creating software in the environment that you’d like to see so that they will stop developing software that depends on the current environment which you may be trying to modify in the future.
Wayne: Right, so being proactive and really thinking about the modern operating system where you are heading sounds to me like a really important discussion to have with your developers and your line of application business owners as well in your organization. So, what’s the third thing that you would ask them to do?
Chris: I don’t think I have a third thing.
Wayne: Well you don’t have to have three. So as part of the SWAT Team I assume that in addition to you shared with me a bit about the application compatibility toolkit, what other resources are available to our customers as they begin planning for this work?
Chris: Well, we’re doing a number of things. Like I said earlier, I described Windows 7 as the great Vista do over. Well a lot of what I mean by that is what are the different things that we can do strategically or the different activities we could be taking? The number one activity that I’m seeing a lot more efforts going on around are not simply looking at the technology, but looking at strategy and best practices. It’s a conversation I’ve been having for a while over trying to formalize it to say do things smarter, think about application management, and reducing your inventory. If you’ve got 20, 30, 40, and I’ve seen as high as 92,000 apps in an organization, what you need to do to make yourself more agile is not to be able to have more highly trained technicians, you need to dump a lot of those apps, and you need to have a strategy for how you are going to fix them, so that there the people doing the remediation know what the bounds are, and really approach things strategically at first, and not just launching directly at the technology. So we’ve got some initiatives going on there to help deliver that message, both from Microsoft and from our partners, we’ve got some great technology solutions, we’ve done some good investments in ACT to make it easier to use and to bring in a lot of the community data, we’ve gone to the Windows Compatibility Center, which is windows.com/compatibility, that now finally integrates with that. It will starting at the end of the month, so I am promised. It’s a pretty reliable source, so I’m pretty sure that will actually take place, so we’ve done a lot of work on the tool side. And then of course, from my perspective, I’m the guy that goes out fixing things, I need all of my latest debugging tools for Windows, I need all my sys internal stuff, and I need LUA Buglight. All of those things put together give you a pretty good toolkit to solve anything you can come across.
Wayne: Sounds great. So building on that, what cool things are you excited about personally about Windows 7? And when you think about the IT professional, or even the consumer for that matter, what gets you pumped up for Windows 7?
Chris: There are a number of things. First of all, I think you’d notice immediately when you start using it is the performance. It is just in every country I’ve been to around the world has commented on the performance. It’s so much snappier feeling, it just feels better to use. Certainly, the user interface, we certainly did some work to lay the foundation in Windows Vista, but the most noticeable thing was this cool pixel-shader thing, which unless you’re a real hardcore geek, you don’t even see how cool that is, you just think “Okay, it’s see-through. Great.” Now we’ve got some really great behaviors in the user interface for helping them manage Windows better. There’s just a lot more for people to get excited about and to sort of feel better while using it, as opposed to the real geeky under the cover stuff, which really represented the story on the most exciting features of Windows Vista that only the geeks really cared about.
Wayne: Sounds great. Hey Chris, is there a website that you would recommend our listeners to learn more about app compatibility and Windows 7 planning?
Chris: Well we’ve got a TechNet portal on technet.com/appcompat. We try to keep that up to date with all of the latest links on tools, guidance, and white papers. We also try to divide things out by what is the role you’ll have in this exercise, so we can try to filter things down to the documents you may find interesting. Something else we’re trying to get is more targeted guidance so that we don’t give you “Hey, here’s the C code that’s compatible” if you’re an IT pro that just wants to learn how to fix a broken app.
Wayne: Well that’s great. We can definitely point our listeners to TechNet. And I want to thank you for your time today Chris, and wish you the best of luck as we move forward with Windows 7 planning and I’m sure our IT pros will appreciate this information today. Thanks to our listeners for joining us today. We spent time with Chris Jackson with Microsoft discussing ways in which Microsoft can help jump start your Windows 7 planning efforts. I’m your host Wayne Applehans. Please join us in May for our next session on making the most out of business intelligence.
Thank you for listening to this Microsoft Podcast for IT professionals. For more great content, please check out www.microsoft.com/podcasts.
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) localized to Japanese! Enjoy.
I’m still catching up on my conference recaps…
TechEd US was another busy conference this year, with a ton of great interactions and lots of activity around Windows 7 to keep things interesting. We ran a Windows 7 application compatibility lab again, and had more advertising than ever, but the folks who were staffing that spent a lot of time bored. Perhaps that’s a good sign for app compat for Windows 7? (Hey, I’m trying to look on the bright side.)
I delivered 3 breakout sessions this go-around: one providing an overview of application compatibility for Windows 7, one talking about how to fix applications using shims, and one going into hard core debugging for application compatibility issues. How did I do? (As always, I list the rank order of my session against all other sessions at the conference with 10 or more evaluations, in this case 396.) The good news is that I was in the Top 10% of scores for almost every attribute of my sessions, with one exception (debugging – we’ll talk about that in the analysis).
| | Win7 Overview | Shims | Debugging |
| Overall | 12 | 18 | 47 |
| Valuable Information | 10 | 33 | 37 |
| Knowledgeable | 3 | 5 | 26 |
| Effective Speaker | 10 | 14 | 51 |
| Effective Demos | 4 | 9 | 42 |
And the comments?
Win7 Overview
Chris is an incredible presenter. I try to make it to all of his sessions each year. He is great to work with outside of the sessions as well.
Chris was able to take a dry subject and make it fun. Good presentation. Good examples/demo.
great session ... great speaker
Great speaker, was able to maintain captive audience.
I had to leave, Chris was yelling over the mic and after 15 minutes I was getting very exhausted of trying to listen.
I was hoping for more how to fix my apps. Found out that there is another session for that, so I'm attending that one too.
informative and on subject.
outstanding speaker
Over 75% of the audience were still on XP. Discussion would be more affective if it went into migration of XP to Windows 7 instead of going from Vista to Windows 7. Not much difference from this latter migration.
Per the session title, I expected more demos and hands on examples on fixing application compatibility issues.
The speaker did an absolutely fabulous job discussing the things that we need to consider when moving to Windows 7. If there was one area of improvement, I would have liked to have seen more information related to moving from XP to 7 instead of Vista to 7. Many of our enterprises have a lot of work to do, so thank you for making sense out of most of it.
Shims
Awesome session. Thanks.
Chris Rocks!!! Very good presentation and his expierence and depth of knowledge just made this great. Thank you ...
Even though the speaker took a survey of the audience and most people responded that they did not know what a shim is, the speaker still did not define what a shim is, or mention which various applications he was using in the demo to fix the problems. He did show how the process works but, for example, he used "Standard User Analyzer" and I have no clue where he got it from. I left early for a different session.
Great session.
Had no idea I could fix some of those nagging legacy apps to work. This was a very powerful presentation and made me feel very enabled! nice job!
I was unaware of shims previous to this session, can't wait to get to creating my own.
This presentation was on a topic that we probably won't have to face at my company. However, the presenter was very knowledgeable and effective. The information I picked up here may come in handy, in case I need it.
Very interesting, demystified app compat for me to a great extent
Debugging
A bit over my head, but definately a good session.
Chris is a pleasure to watch. One day I want to be Chris Jackson
cjacks is a great and lively presenter who knows his stuff
Excellent session - not for your typical TechEd attendee. Outstanding delivery and extremely useful material.
good thought provoking session. Thanks!
I'm not a developer or a debugger, but Chris made this presentation one of the best of TechEd!
Phenomenal
Here are my take-aways from this data:
Scores aren’t as informative as comments. Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out comments, it really is helpful in helping me interpret the data that I receive. If you take a look at the numbers alone, my overview session was the highest rated session. However, the comments revealed some mixed feelings. My debugging session had ratings that were mostly not even in the Top 10%, but received comments that defined people who were extremely enthused. Which leads me to this:
A Likert scale has the fundamental flaw of clipping feedback. As pointed out above, the debugging session was clearly the lowest rated session, and to some extent that was expected. I set out to go hard core. I called the session “Not For the Faint of Heart: Hard Core App Compat Debugging.” But, despite that, people are still going to show up and think it’s too technical and get lost. Those people aren’t going to give you the great scores. However, for people who are delighted, the score doesn’t capture that delight. It’s one of the risks of presenting something that’s almost necessarily going to divide folks along these lines. But I’d rather actually give you something that delights you at the expense of going over some peoples’ heads, because sticking to the least common denominator means you can never go hard core geek. I like to have a little of that around – the burden is mine to keep the quality levels high enough that we can continue to have sessions like these despite alienating a few people.
I appear to know what I’m talking about. This is the area of highest ratings across the board. Thanks for that – it makes me feel great!
I need to figure out some way to do Windows XP – Windows 7. I’ve been presenting on the delta from Windows Vista to Windows 7, not only because the delta from Windows XP to Windows Vista is so thoroughly documented, but also because it’s really hard to fit that into a single hour. (I deliver a 2 day workshop covering this – how do I squeeze that into 1/16 of the normal size?) However, it’s coming back loud and clear that making you connect the dots isn’t working so well.
Mic check at normal volume. I had one dissatisfied attendee who thought I was yelling. I don’t really so much yell, per se, as have a voice that carries well enough that I seldom actually need a microphone. So, when I do have one, it can be kind of loud. Fortunately, this feedback came in the first session, and I was able to do better mic checks for the other 2 sessions.
One day I want to be Chris Jackson. OK, that’s just the most f*ing awesome comment ever.
I’m a wee bit behind on reflecting on the conferences that I was fortunate enough to participate in, but I like to spend the time to think about it. I guess to some extent it’s probably fairly selfish of me, because I think that the most frequent user of this data is me (I use it when I’m looking back and trying to remember what went right and what could have gone better), but hopefully you can forgive my indulgence.
I was at MMS 2009 this year, and other than participating in a chalk talk and spending some time at the booth, I only ended up delivering one breakout session (which is rather abnormally small for me at a conference). How did it go? Well, it was in the Top 5 list for Friday sessions, but as always, I like to compare myself to all other speakers for the entire week, and see where I fall in the stack ranks.
The good thing is: I was in the Top 10% of all sessions (there were 146 with 10 or more evaluation reports) for all but one variable. And the results are rather interesting to reflect on, because I took an altogether different approach for this session than my normal session deliveries (mostly because it’s a completely different audience, one that I struggled to connect with at MMS 2008). Here’s how I landed:
| | ACT 5.5 |
| Overall | 20 |
| Usefulness | 15 |
| Knowledge | 15 |
| Presentation Skills | 15 |
| Slides | 12 |
| Demos | 15 |
| Relevant | 13 |
| Technical Content | 12 |
| Average | 15 |
And here were the comments from the evaluations:
Chris, excellent session on ACT. Will be email you soon.
Great presentation. it gave me a lot more information than i had expected to get. I am glad i stuck around for this last session.
Had to leave early, but enjoyed what I saw. Look forward to downloading the .WMV file as seeing what I missed.
This was the best session of all week. It was very very intresting and the presenter was really really good
very good info
Very valuable info - I will be showing slides and recordings to Testing team - I hope they will be as excited about this as I am!
Since I don’t have a pile of sessions to compare what went well and what didn’t I just have to look at attributes. So, here’s my take on this data:
ACT Talks that go a little bit geeky fill a gap. There have been talks about ACT for years, and 5.5 wasn’t that different. This talk could have been the epitome of mediocrity, but going geeky and finally answering some nagging questions (not to mention ensuring that we understand where the rubber meets the road) led to some decent scores. This is going to inspire me to continue to talk about internals and give you more raw data in order to drive your decisions.
Whatever made people think the session was mostly good isn’t captured on these attributes. It’s hard for me to figure out why I dropped out of the top 10% for Overall Sat when I’m in the top 10% on all of the attributes we’re measuring.
I can deliver slides and still be technical enough. For those of you who have seen me present at other conferences, one of the things I commonly do is present mostly demos. In some cases, it’s even 100% demo. Here, it was mostly slides, and I managed to receive good scores for both the quality of the slides and the technical content. Nice.
Talking about ACT was timely. With the impending release of Windows 7, there are a lot of people interested in this. Let’s make sure we keep ahead of the game and ensure we’re giving you the information you need when you need it.
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 for the binary, you can spot right away that it’s going to trigger installer detection, given the presence of the word “Install” in multiple places. You can also turn on shim diagnostics and see that it’s wiring up with GenericInstaller.
But why wasn’t it popping PCA on Windows Vista? Is this a new PCA scenario? I explored that, and discovered that it was Scenario #1 – an app that we detect as a setup doesn’t leave anything behind in Add/Remove Programs. That suggests possible failure.
So, existing scenario, new PCA prompt, and the final bit of evidence: the application doesn’t prompt for UAC Elevation on either Windows Vista or Windows 7. You should now be able to connect all of the dots.
The application has a UAC manifest.
On Windows Vista, the presence of a UAC manifest disables PCA. On Windows 7, that’s not good enough. You have to have one of the new-fangled Windows 7 GUIDs in your manifest to avoid PCA annoyance.
So, if you’re following along, here’s what happened:
- Customer has an app that looks suspiciously enough like an installer that the operating system is trying to intervene and make things work
- Developer notices that, doesn’t want/need the elevation, wonders how to make it go away, and discovers our documentation saying how you can turn off setup detection by including a UAC manifest – being good law-abiding citizens, they do exactly that (at their own expense)
- Unbeknownst to the developer, we came along behind their back and changed the rules to make our previous guidance null and void, and once again we’re annoying their users with dialog boxes that make the developer look bad
- Now the developer, if they wanted to make their users happy, would have to stop what they are doing, update their currently shipping app to include a manifest for an operating system that isn’t even released yet, so that Windows 7 can be more successful by having a more compatible and friendly OS (at their own expense)
- Repeat for every subsequent version of Windows, as the Windows 7 GUID would no longer indicate Windows 8 compatibility either when it comes along
Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture?
I’m trying to see what we can do about this, because I don’t think we’re being fair to developers right now. I believe that an asInvoker manifest is a pretty darned good indication that you’re not an installer, both from the perspective of GenericInstaller and PCA. I have absolutely no idea why somebody would disagree.
In the interim, rather than gripe about this (if you only know how many not-so-polite words and pejorative phrases I have already deleted from this blog post, you’d likely be very disappointed in me), I figured I’d tell you how you can fix it until whenever / if ever we address this:
Shim your application with SpecificNonInstaller.
I know of no other way to tell setup detection that “hey, you’re wrong” that will survive into the future. Because UAC Manifests only work on Windows Vista, Windows 7 Manifests will presumably only work on Windows 7, and who knows what you’ll need in the future?
What I don’t understand about PCA is, why haven’t we learned our lesson that asking the user a question every time we’re confused isn’t the right approach? <sigh />
This Thursday, June 18, 2009, my friend Mark is hosting a virtual roundtable on Windows 7 Application Compatibility. Alas, they didn’t think to check my schedule, and I have a customer commitment this week (and I do not ever turn my back on a customer) so I’m not going to be able to make it. However, even though I am “The App Compat Guy” I’m still just a guy, and the show must go on – and they’ve filled the room with enough interesting folks that I’m sure nobody will miss me. We’re also planning a second part to the series for shortly before RTM, which I’m going to be blocking off in advance, so none to worry if you have some strange desire to have a look at my ugly mug.
Thursday, June 18, 2009, 11:00 am Pacific Time
https://ms.istreamplanet.com/springboard
Enjoy! And make sure you send in question to stump them in advance. vrtable@microsoft.com is the alias to email your questions to. Seriously, make them work for it! :-) (Perhaps you can ask for some code examples on using the Sdb* APIs?) My friends from ChangeBase and AppDNA will be there as well, so it really should be worth your time.
I’ve seen this error come up a few times now, and there’s a (dirty, ugly) hack you can use to fix it. So, for those who are fans of dirty, ugly hacks, here you go.
If you see the error:
ACM encountered the following error while performing synchronization:
Persistence_FlushSqlError
Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint ‘IssueSolution_PrimaryKey’.
Cannot insert duplicate key in object ‘dbo.IssueSolution’.
Stale Data
The statement has been terminated.
Would you like to retry?
You can fix it by (remember, I said it was a dirty, ugly hack) removing the constraint:
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[IssueSolution] DROP CONSTRAINT [IssueSolution_PrimaryKey]
Good luck, and sorry for the bug.
Since I’m using Mark’s tools, I figure I may as well steal his blog title scheme…
I had a customer come to me with a question on Standard User Analyzer (SUA), looking for an explanation for why it was coming back with the following error:
Failed to load log file C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Temp\sua
No (valid) log file is found.
I asked him to try opening it up in Application Verifier, which he was able to do successfully.
So, now we knew that the problem was somewhere between collecting the data and displaying it – we’d narrowed down the surface area rather significantly. What happens in that time? Well, SUA is kind enough to tell you. First, it clears existing logs:
Executing: cmd.exe /c "del /q "C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Temp\sua""
Returned : 0
Then, we export the logs we just created:
Executing: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5\Standard User Analyzer\SUAnalyzerSrv.exe" exportlogs "C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Temp\sua" "(symbol file directory)"
Returned : 0
Finally, we view it, but this was the step which was failing. We could browse to the temp directory it was using and discover that it was, indeed, clear, so now we know that the command to export logs was our most likely suspect. But it was returning 0, which presumably meant success, so we had very little to go on.
Fortunately, I was able to find a repro relatively quickly. And, when in doubt, use Process Monitor.
I didn’t even have to go any further than the process tree. I found the call to SUAnalyzerSrv.exe, and it made a call to appverif.exe – Application Verifier. Here was the arguments it was passing:
appverif.exe -export log -for AppVerifier Bug Generator.exe -with To=C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Temp\sua\AppVerifier Bug Generator.exe.0.xml Log=0 Symbols=(symbol file directory)
It’s when you see this that you probably notice something: the name of the binary … has a space in it.
I renamed the binary to remove the spaces, and it worked. No problems importing. So, I filed a bug against SUA, and it’s going to be fixed for the next release. In the interim, if SUA isn’t working as well as you’d like, well, the EXTREMELY hacky workaround may be to rename the binary…
In the run-up to any operating system release, we start to see a lot of “world tour fever” and Windows 7 is no different. Windows has a huge partner ecosystem, and we want to make sure that we at least stand a fighting chance of helping you get it done by at least getting a little bit closer to where you are – and that involves collecting a few frequent flier miles.
June looks to be USA month, and I saw this come across my email, so I figured I’d share it. The Developer and Partner Evangelism (DPE) team is holding 4 events in June for ISVs:
June 1 – Mountain View, CA
June 8 – Reston, VA
June 15 – Alpharetta, GA
June 22 – Waltham, MA
If you’re interested in an opportunity to work with some of our engineers to test your application on Windows 7 (and get some help debugging it if it doesn’t work), you can register here:
http://www.msregistration.com/Win7USA
I’m not doing any of these myself, though I’ve done these events in Taipei and Tokyo and they’ve always been very enlightening and can start a great dialog. I hope some of you are able to attend!
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
A while back, I posted about my experiences running at High DPI. Running Windows 7, I’ve been running High DPI for many months now, and I can no longer imagine going back. I had no issues with the technology.
So then I got brave. Yesterday, I decided to pull the trigger and set up my wife’s laptop with Windows 7 RC, and configure her with High DPI so that she wouldn’t change the resolution down to 1024 x 768 any longer. It took her about 10 seconds to find an issue with it.
“Why is everything so tiny on the login screen?”
Ah, yes. One unfortunate side-effect of having High-DPI be a per-user setting is that now you don’t have that setting apply to the login screen any longer. This was clearly unacceptable to my wife, so I had to root around and find some way to fix this. I figured I’d share in case it’s interesting to anyone else.
I went to the key:
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
And I added a LogPixels DWORD value, and set it to 0x78 (120 decimal) to set the DPI to 125% (120 DPI) on the login screen. Worked a treat.
Allow me to describe the typical scenario for a first time user for the Application Compatibility Manager component of ACT 5.5:
Get an inventory, press send/receive, discover that you don’t find as much data on there as you expected, then send an email to an alias (that I’m probably on) which either questions whether you’ve done it right or accuses us of being some variation of useless and/or incompetent. Then, you give up on the feature and feel indignant.
So, let’s review that history to get some perspective, and then talk about what we’ve done to improve things in ACT 5.5.
We know that we don’t want everyone to have to go to every vendor site in the world and look up everything that they own. Plus, you could discover that it isn’t supported, but what if you don’t care, and you just want to know if it works? So here’s what we came up with.
Plan A:
Let’s make a level of logo certification so darned easy that absolutely everybody would do it. We’ll call it Works With Windows Vista, and *all* you have to do is tell the world that you support the app on Windows Vista. Boom – you’re done. No third party testing, no checks to write for that testing, no requirements to meet. You support it, and we’ll tell your customers that you do. How easy is that? Everyone will do that, won’t they?
As it turns out, not so much. Based on the inventory I have of around 50 machines, it looks like it’s pretty much Microsoft and the Google Toolbar who will do that. Yikes. That’s … not … quite … everybody …
But not to worry, we have a plan B! (No, really, we did! We anticipated that there was some probability of failure!)
Plan B:
Hey, even if vendors don’t some to us in droves, we can still get the IT Pros of the world to share their experiences, right? We may not know if the application is supported, but at least we have some sense on whether people think it works or not, right?
But, as it turns out, human nature applies to … humans. Drat. What did the first person who hit sync find? That’s right – nothing! So, how much of a debt to “society” do you think this person felt? After they have voted on all of their applications, we’ve got to convince people to hit sync one more time, even though that time (the time that matters to the next person to come along) can do *absolutely nothing* for the person who is helping that person. With no sense of debt, it turns out this doesn’t happen very much. Unless, of course, you think 10 people using Adobe Reader is rather a lot (personally, I’m guessing their market penetration is slightly higher).
Well, crap – that’s strike 2. And we didn’t have a plan C.
The comeback
So, given that things weren’t shaking out quite the way we had planned (we hadn’t expected both ideas to fail quite as spectacularly as they had), we had to scramble to come up with Plan C. If the vendor wasn’t coming to us, and the people at large weren’t either, well heck – we’ll just hire some people to do the exact thing we were trying to spare you from: just browse one vendor site after another looking for support statements. So that’s exactly what we did. We threw all of that together into a website called appreadiness.com, and eventually we made a website that actually looked nice (like I said, the first go-around was our rush job because it simply wasn’t an option to have nothing) called the Windows Compatibility Center.
http://windows.com/compatibility
That works great when you want to know about one application, but what about when you need to know about all of the apps you have? Searching one at a time is better than searching one at a time on every vendor web site, but not by much.
So, we make things available to download – you can find “the list” here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9df23606-7276-4ce2-8993-143e101ddbcd&displaylang=en
One great big giant Excel sheet with everything we’ve looked up so far, and you can fuzzy match against them.
Initially, it was a crusty old one from appreadiness.com, but now we’re updating it regularly (hooray!). 8000 apps and counting.
ACT 5.5 Improvements
ACT 5.5 does that Excel sheet one better: it now automagically pulls in all of that vendor data and matches it up to your applications! (It’s most of the way done now, too – we just got this lit up in time for a demo at MMS.) So now, you can benefit from the group of folks whose job it is to do the searching on vendor web sites so you don’t have to.
We also revisited Plan B, because we still think that has a place (not everyone needs support for all of their apps, but it sure would be nice to know if it worked or not). Some of the biggest complaints we got?
“Even if I say not to send my vote on an app, you would send the fact that we have the app, and its mere existence is a trade secret.” Fixed – we now don’t even send the fact that you have it. (Of course, that also means you don’t get any vendor or community data, but if its very existence is a trade secret chances are it’s not commercial software anyway.)
“Wait – who are you quoting above that knows it sent the existence of the app? What is this thing sending anyway?” Fixed – you now have the option to preview the exact XML that we’ll send up, and you can inspect it thoroughly and audit what it’s sending to ensure that it’s kosher before you go syncing with a web service.
Are we there yet? Not completely – it still takes a lot of effort, because there is no one source for everything that is known anywhere on earth about any given app. But we’re trying to close that gap in ways that make sense to you. Keep giving us feedback, because we are listening, and reacting just as quickly as we can!
About a year ago, at TechEd IT Professionals 2008, Josh Hoffman and I were in a bloggers panel together talking about Windows Vista. (Windows what?) Afterwards, he came up to me and asked me if I could put together an article on application compatibility for IT Professionals someday for the magazine. Well, I sat on the idea for a while, and eventually decided to write something about managing the project, and then write a second article about shims.
Of course, before I got to writing about shims, my buddy Chris Corio approached me about writing an article on ACT, and I suggested doing a deep dive on internals for the new 5.5 release.
So, I never actually finished up that shims article, but the other two are published just in time for distribution here at TechEd 2009. You can read the online version here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd799202.aspx
The ACT 5.5 article, in particular, addresses questions that I end up being asked all the time. What’s really going on with those agents? What data are they looking for, and how? I’ve been giving talks on some of these internals lately (most recently at MMS) and it appears as if people are excited to finally have this information in their hot little hands.
Farewell, Josh, and Godspeed. It’s been an honor working with you. (Now, of course, I have absolutely no idea how to submit that shims article when I get around to writing it, since I always just shot email to Josh directly. And so it goes.)
