Chris Jackson's Semantic Consonance : ACT 5.5

Windows 7 Vendor Compatibility Data Now Available in ACT 5.5

Chris Jackson — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:59:54 GMT

It’s been a long road to get here, but the checklist is now complete. Vendor data for Windows 7 application compatibility, previously available on the web and as a downloadable Excel sheet, is finally integrated into ACT 5.5!

Here is some information on this data, courtesy of the team:

How many applications do we have data for?

We have data for around 7,000 applications. What is interesting is that there is more work than just 7,000 – each application may map to more than one app ID, and in fact we have data for around 38,000 distinct AppIDs. (Incidentally, if you don’t see data for an application in ACT but it’s on the web, this could be caused by repackaging, by interim releases we are unaware of, or a number of other things. AppIDs are very literal and require perfect fidelity input to deliver comprehensive output.)

How frequently will this data be updated?

Initially, ever 2 weeks, so make sure you sync ever so often to see the latest data. As the vendor input tapers off, we may reduce this in the future.

Will the data have complete parity with the compatibility center?

It’s the same back end, but since we use different AppIDs we have to use heuristics to match between the different AppID schemes. Heuristics, by definition, can be imperfect. Add to this the potential issues above (repackaging, lesser known versions) and this would explain any delta in the data. We’re constantly reviewing our heuristics and improving them, plus we have long term plans to consolidate on a single AppID scheme.

Will I see compatibility status for 64-bit applications?

Today, it’s just 32-bit status, as that is what ACT 5.5 supports. ACT 6.0 will support 64-bit Windows and include 64-bit compatibility status. It should be released later this year.

Congratulations to the team for achieving this long-awaited milestone! I know I have already synced up my database.

Why don’t I see any data for Vendor Assessment for Windows 7 in ACT 5.5?

Chris Jackson — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:03:46 GMT

A few weeks ago, I spoke about how our information on vendor data was slowly making it through the channel, beginning with the compatibility center (complete), moving on to the downloadable Application Compatibility List for IT Pros (complete), and finally getting to ACT. I suggested, “The target date for this integration is mid-December 2009.” To call December 22 “mid-December” is already stretching it, and yet it’s still not showing up in ACT. What gives?

Well, let’s talk a little bit about the data and how it has to move through the system. In the end, it all comes from the same database. The compat center, the downloadable list, the data that feeds the upgrade advisor – all from the same source. What is taking so long to turn on the spigot for ACT?

Well, the big challenge is data transformation. First, the App ID has to be translated. The 3 live services all use a new algorithm for determining an application ID. ACT hopes to transition to use this new algorithm in the next version, but it’s one of those “running in place” changes where, after spending a lot of time and money, the end result looks identical to the user, so it’s difficult to justify rushing the transition (particularly since invalidating an existing inventory full of old App IDs is a terrible idea, so the application will need to support both old and new, and be able to differentiate between them). That translation needs to be automated so it can run in perpetuity, and that process has to be build. Then, the web service that feeds ACT is the old version (v1) while the others are using a much newer version (v4), so the old web service interface has to be modified to leverage the new database feeding it. So, there are two feats of engineering that need to be implemented, tested, and proven at scale.

We’re still hoping to have this done the first week of January, but vacations and winter colds are making this more challenging. Rest assured, this data is coming and we are terrible sorry for any inconvenience the delay is causing – we really do want the data to be accessible and convenient and are not neglecting the value this has to customers.

How to Hack your Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 (ACT 5.5) Database to Locate 16-bit Files in your Application Inventory

Chris Jackson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:02:46 GMT

(Wow, I’m doing a lot more posting today than normal. Things kind of piled up while I was on leave.)

There is a ton of activity going on in the world regarding Windows 7 deployments, and one of the hottest topics we’re finding is x64. People are very interested in moving to the 64-bit version of the operating system, but one obvious question is, will my applications be broken?

The next version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit, ACT 6.0, is scheduled to have far more robust x64 support. (It’s scheduled to support it at all, which is already a bonus.) But what about in the interim?

First of all, there is the Setup Analysis Tool. This will detect 16-bit binaries (probably a problem for 64-bit Windows, unless setup is detecting the bitness of the OS and dropping file appropriately) and driver installation (possibly a problem for 64-bit Windows, unless setup is detecting the bitness of the OS and dropping files appropriately). But this requires a fair amount of work to get configured and running, and it also means that you have to have the setup files. Depending on how managed your environment is, that may be a problem.

If you’re the sort that doesn’t mind undocumented secrets, I’ll let you in on one: ACT already collects the bitness of the files it finds in an inventory scan, it just doesn’t surface that in the UI today. So, how can you view this information? Why, hack the database of course. My SQL skills are so rusty these days I’m beyond embarrassed of what I crufted together, but here is a query I hacked up to display all of the files that are neither 32-bit (user mode 32-bit is probably OK) nor 64-bit (definitely OK) in your ACT database:

USE ACT55
GO

SELECT DISTINCT Applications.appName, Static_App_Properties.fileName, fileModuleType

FROM Static_App_Properties
INNER JOIN Application_Instance_Files
ON Static_App_Properties.identity_hash = Application_Instance_Files.filePropertyID
INNER JOIN Applications
ON Application_Instance_Files.appID = Applications.identity_hash

WHERE fileModuleType<>'32BIT' AND fileModuleType<>'64BIT' AND propertyType='File'

ORDER BY appName
GO

The schema is, as always, undocumented and subject to change, but I have found this helpful in a few scenarios to quickly zero in on apps to specifically test on 64-bit when targeting a mixed environment. I suspect you’ll have to do less hacking with ACT 6.0.

Localized Documentation for the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 (ACT 5.5) Available in 10 Languages

Chris Jackson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:12:47 GMT

今日は。Guten Tag. Bonjour. ¡Hola! 안녕하세요. 你好. Ciao. Здравствуйте. Olá.

I’ve been on leave for a while, so my apologies for being quiet lately. I’ve been sitting on this news for a while, though I think these links might come in handy if you are touching a global audience. We have localized the documentation for ACT into 10 different languages:

汉语 (Chinese - Mainland)

汉语 - 台灣 (Chinese – Taiwan)

Italiano (Italian)

русский язык (Russian)

Português (Portuguese – Brazil)

If there is one thing I have noticed in my travels, it’s that language is a hard barrier to cross. This is a small but important step. As group after group stretches their brains to understand my English (or my horrible Japanese), we’re taking a few more steps to meet in the middle. I’ve also been doing some work to build more labs – things with fewer words that let the products and experiences do the teaching so they are shorter and less expensive to translate, but still deliver the core knowledge. Because, no matter where you are in this little world of ours, we’re all in this together.

How to Remove the RC Designation from the Windows 7 Reports in ACT 5.5

Chris Jackson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:56:30 GMT

We shipped ACT 5.5 back in April 2009, several months before we shipped Windows 7. Helpfully (I guess) we decided to label it Windows 7 RC in the UI so you could specifically track your testing against the release candidate. We had the idea that we could update this via our web service, so that once we hit RTM we could just push out an update to modify this.

And apparently we forgot to turn this little bit of code on.

So, now we have a bunch of folks around the world who wonder why ACT seems to be in a beta phase and not ready for Windows 7 RTM.

Well, it is ready for Windows 7 RTM, and I bet some of you would like it to look ready. We’re really sorry we can’t do that using the mechanisms we planned to use, so I figured I’d let you in on the secret to the planned update.

We were going to update 2 fields in the database.

So, if you want your ACT UI to look ready for the ~~future~~ present, you can run this bit of SQL:

UPDATE dbo.OS
SET osName='Windows 7'
WHERE osName='Windows 7 RC'
GO
UPDATE dbo.OS
SET osName='Windows Server 2008 R2'
WHERE osName='Windows Server 2008 R2 RC'
GO

Enjoy, and sorry for the inconvenience.

ACT 5.5 in Non-English Locales Not Recognizing Date Strings: Workaround and Long Term Fix

Chris Jackson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:52:47 GMT

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.

MMS 2009 Recap

Chris Jackson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:47:01 GMT

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.

How to Fix the ACT 5.5 Persistence_FlushSqlError

Chris Jackson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:06:42 GMT

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.

The Case of the SUA Missing Log File

Chris Jackson — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:16:31 GMT

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…

The Long and Sordid History of Vendor and Community Data in the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5

Chris Jackson — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:57:05 GMT

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!

What’s New in ACT 5.5

Chris Jackson — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:31:43 GMT

The new ACT is here! The new ACT is here!

I’m always on the forefront of breaking news, eh? We shipped ACT 5.5, erm, 11 days ago. (What can I say, it’s been a busy 11 days.) I know a little while back I blogged about whether or not you can wait for it, but now you don’t have to. Nice.

So, I figured I’d talk about a few things that makes this a very worthwhile download. But before I do, I figured you should understand the size of the team that managed to pull this off. The dev team, if I am not mistaken, averaged just slightly over 1 person. The test team averaged less than 1 person. The PM team averaged over 1 person. The documentation team averaged a fraction of a person. Clearly, some trade-offs are required with this kind of a team, and hopefully we made the right ones. (My #1 request remains adding integration points so you can extend the product and/or integrate it with the rest of your infrastructure, but that’s big stuff that a tiny team isn’t likely to pull off. I keep hoping.) That being said, here’s what I like about what’s new:

DCP Tagging

This is one of the most requested features in ACT (other than integration points), and you can use this in a number of ways.

If you are planning to deploy Windows by role (in my experience the best way to do it), you can have your DCPs that you deploy to members of each role tagged. Now, when you want to see what software is used by people in each role, you simply pull up everything with this tag. You just can’t do that with 5.0. The closest you’d come is to collect the first role first, categorize them, then the second role, categorize the uncategorized ones, and so forth. But, if you change deployment order, you’re hosed; you depend on apps being fixed from earlier roles, because you can’t determine the overlap.

If you have multiple organizations that you serve, but you don’t want to manage separate databases (perhaps a loosely aligned collection of business units?) you can now consolidate but still pry things apart as you need to.

Identifying the remainder of scenarios is left as an exercise to the reader – this one is really something you can invent all kinds of uses for.

SUA Works with Application Verifier 4.0

Remember the post where I had to link to old versions of Application Verifier? No more! Now you can use the up-to-date version! And, of course, that also means you can use SUA on Windows 7 now (since AppVerifier 3.x doesn’t work so well on it).

SUA kinda-sorta works on Windows 7 x64

OK, 64-bit isn’t officially supported for ACT anywhere. But SUA flat out didn’t work. I don’t know about Windows Vista (I never tried it) but definitely not on Windows 7. The reason? AppVerifier had a little bug (they’re fixing it, but they weren’t going to be done in time for ACT 5.5 and we didn’t want to delay it) where the COM interfaces weren’t working correctly from 32-bit processes. And SUA happened to be calling them from 32-bit processes. So, we brainstormed some alternate solutions, but because you have to call 32-bit AppVerifier to get 32-bit logs, the avenue we finally pursued was using the command line interface to AppVerifier instead of the COM interface. So, things mostly work for testing 32-bit apps on x64 versions of Windows 7 (to my knowledge) – I have not tried it against 64-bit apps, because I’ve never needed that in real life. This is not a guarantee that ACT will work for you on 64-bit, that using it on x64 won’t cause permanent sterility, yada yada. But hey, there were some last-minute heroics on the part of the team to at least give best effort here, and they blew me away. The team may be small, but that doesn’t mean they’re not awesome.

CompatAdmin has more shim docs in the help, and it now shows you help … ALL the time!

This was my pet peeve bug. I guess that’s because the tiny contribution I make was affected by it. You see, I write up the shim documentation, and then hand it off to my favorite technical writer, Liz, who converts them into product-ese. And yes, we have more in ACT 5.5. (What can I say – I have the most boring hobby in the world. Writing documentation.)

But, if you use 5.0, you’ll notice a little something funny. Select a shim in the system shim database (which is where all the shims are). Notice that little sentence. Is it helpful? Maybe, but probably not. What do you do next? Well, hopefully you look it up in the help. Try it. Guess what? The help –> about functionality is disabled! This bug was open forever, so I used the oldest trick in the book. I debugged it myself. That gets stuff fixed WAY faster. Here’s what I found:

0:000> kP
ChildEBP RetAddr
000be9d4 00134dac USER32!EnableMenuItem(
                          struct HMENU__ * hMenu = 0x075b08ad,
                          unsigned int uIDEnableItem = 0,
                          unsigned int uEnable = 0x401)

Look that up in MSDN, and you’ll find that the code was disabling the first item of EVERY menu, when it intended to just disable the first item in the first menu. And help was unfortunate enough to be the first menu item. Fixed. Now, you can always get to the help!

Nice.

You don’t have to see reports for operating systems you aren’t migrating to.

When we supported one type of migration, piece of cake. It’s all we’d show. But we got to the point of having so many flavors, it was just confusing. So, now you can pick the ones you care about. Subtle, but a nice touch.

Those are the highlights. Have a look. Yes, we do support some additional deprecation detection (Windows Mail), but in my experience that’s an extremely low-impact deprecation for the enterprise. And there are a number of other bug fixes. Not a bad showing for a tool developed by 3.141592653589793238462
643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628
034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408
128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975
665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454
326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829
254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609 people.

What is Coming in ACT 5.5, and Should You Wait for It?

Chris Jackson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:16:48 GMT

With the release of the Windows 7 beta, there has been a lot of speculation about an accompanying version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit. Because the release of a version of ACT so frequently accompanies the release of an OS (or a significant service pack, such as Windows XP SP1), we’ve generated this perception in the community that you have to have the version of ACT that is matched up with that particular version of Windows. (We see this a lot with people who are just now deploying Windows XP SP2 – they start looking around for older versions of ACT, which are no longer available.)

ACT 5.5 is scheduled to be ready by around April. (I’ve also done a piece for TechNet Magazine with my friend Chris Corio that goes deep into the internals of ACT which should be out at around the same time – stay tuned for that.) If you plan to start getting ready for a Windows 7 deployment, do you need to wait for it?

I don’t think you do.

But, rather than me just throwing out an opinion, let me walk through the process of an application compatibility project, point out what you could do today with ACT 5.0.3 (the currently available version), and then point out what you would get in addition if you were to wait.

Collect

What you can do today with ACT 5.0

You need an inventory of what software you have in order to drive your project. ACT 5.0 will give you an excellent inventory of what you have, so you can get started today figuring out what you have in your ecosystem. In fact, I recommend it, unless…

When you should wait for ACT 5.5

There is a compelling new feature in ACT 5.5 that may be worth the wait: the ability to “tag” a DCP package. If you have the ability to target deployment of your DCPs, and you’d like to have the applications in your inventory come back reflecting where they came from, then this may be worth the wait.

ACT 5.5 will include new deprecations in the deprecation agent – specifically, the Windows Mail deprecations. If you see Outlook Express / Windows Mail displaying UI in your organization, then this may be important. But, to be honest, I don’t expect this to have a significant impact on many enterprises at all, so unless you’re particularly worried about this, it may not be worth waiting for. (Obviously it’s useful once it’s out, but do you really want to set yourself back a couple of months to get this if you’d rather get started today?)

Analyze

What you can do today with ACT 5.0

It kind of depends on how much it bugs you to see “Windows Vista” in the report category as to whether or not you’re comfortable using it.

The compatibility data will be from Windows Vista and not from Windows 7, but not only are we not breaking that many more things, it’s not as if that data was terribly good to start with (even with Windows Vista, going to windows.com/compatibility was your better option).

And, of course, if you dump your inventory into Excel to analyze, then 5.0 is fine.

When you should wait for ACT 5.5

ACT 5.5 will display Windows 7 as an option in the report listing, so that will satisfy your sense of aesthetics. In addition, because the list of operating systems is starting to get kind of big, and you’re likely to only be migrating to one at a time, you will be able to filter them and only display the one you intend to deploy. That simplifies the UI a bit.

If you are worried about the data you send up to the ACT web service, ACT 5.5 is going to add on some functionality to help. 5.0 would always send the unique Application ID up – but if you unselected it we wouldn’t send any of your evaluation data. ACT 5.5 won’t even send up the ID (as a result, you won’t be able to see any community data for this app) and the tool gives you direct visibility into the exact data that you are sending up. For folks who are concerned about this, you may want to wait for this feature before you sync.

ACT 5.5 will also be able to support syncing with the Windows Compatibility Center – so no more manually looking things up at windows.com/compatibility! My understanding is that this may not be fully ready to go when the product ships, but it will be able to support it once the service is ready to go. I think that’s going to be huge.

Note that this doesn’t mean you can’t collect your inventory now – I haven’t personally tested the database upgrade scenario, but I have been loading up my sample database with the log files from an ACT 5.0 DCP deployment, and have had no problems doing so. My guess is that we’ll elegantly handle a database upgrade from 5.0 as well (I just don’t want to promise something I haven’t tried myself).

Test and Mitigate

What you can do today with ACT 5.0

Standard User Analyzer

SUA is relatively unchanged from the ACT 5.0 version. One big change: you need AppVerifier 4.0+ on Windows 7, and only the ACT 5.5 version works with AppVerifier 4.0+. So, you’d just have to do your testing on Windows Vista or earlier.

Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool

IECTT supports IE8 today, so you don’t have to wait for anything to start investigating your web applications!

Setup Analysis Tool

Does anybody use the setup analysis tool? It remains, and it’s as uninteresting today as it was for Windows Vista. This could be the last time we see this tool.

Compatibility Administrator

Compatibility Administrator is relatively unchanged, and you can use it today on Windows 7 without hesitation.

When you should wait for ACT 5.5

Standard User Analyzer

If you want to test with SUA on Windows 7 itself, you’ll have to wait. But for getting started to get your apps ready for a more secure environment today, you’ll get the same functionality down-level.

Last I heard, LUA Buglight also has a version check (alas, in the driver, so you can’t shim it) that keeps it from running on Windows 7, but current builds work fine on Windows 7. Not sure when Aaron plans to release an update.

Summary

Have we filled all of the gaps with ACT 5.5? Certainly not. I’d love to do more to help people rationalize apps. I’d love to have a smooth integration story (heck, I’d take a rough one if I could just get anything). I’d like a better 64-bit story (that’s on deck). I’d like more focus on the actual process than the technology. There’s always something else I want. But there is some good stuff coming (I’ll never be satisfied anyway).

In conclusion, the ACT 5.5 story falls very much in line with the rest of the Windows 7 application compatibility story. You can get started today and not incur too much risk of a tool or feature coming along later that is killer. The tags for DCPs may be a killer feature (they’re certainly a highly requested one), but otherwise you can get started today, and the work you do with the tools you have will translate to results in the future.

If you get started with your inventory and your rationalization, then you can just expect more data to come along later to help you out. In the interim, you can at least be identifying the projects that require a lot of work, and get started on them now. It’s simply a lot smarter to get any fixes you may need (to play nicely with the new security posture begun with Windows Vista and continuing with Windows 7) by working them in to the natural development and deployment cycle of your software today, rather than it is to try to squeeze them all in at the same time only when you begin the deployment of an operating system later.

I hope this little review is helpful for formulating your tools strategy if a migration to Windows 7 is in your future…