Two Microsoft AppCompat Updates this week...

We (the development team and I) have been incredibly busy over the last few weeks getting the final touches on our latest release of our software and it looks like Microsoft has been busy too. There have been a few updates recently including;

The Microsoft Application Compatibility Tool-kit has been updated to version to 5.0.3 (from the recent update of 5.0.2) which can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=24DA89E9-B581-47B0-B45E-492DD6DA2971&displaylang=en

Chris Jackson from Microsoft has offered some useful information on what bugs have been fixed and the updates included in this latest release.

His blog can be found here; http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks

and the link to the release notes mentioned by Chris can be found here;

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/2008/09/02/announcing-act-5-0-3-a-k-a-act-5-0-5428-1080.aspx

I still struggle with ACT as a pure-play compatibility assessment tool, but it can offer some interesting debugging information when you encounter an application that simply won't start or generates a spurious error dialog box on Windows Vista or Server 2008. As mentioned in one of my other posts on the Terminal Services Compatibility Analyzer (MS TSCA), the Standard User Analyzer (SUA) is important tool in your application compatibility assessments efforts.

In addition to this update, the Microsoft Virtualization team has been busy putting the finishing touches on their latest release of Microsoft Application Virtualization (MAV and formerly SoftGrid) with the RTM of version 4.5. The MAV team blog has a really enthusiastic description of the updates included in this release which can be found here;

http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/09/03/microsoft-application-virtualization-4-5-rtms.aspx

I am particularly interested in the new "Dynamic Application Virtualization" feature, which is described by the MAV team as;

"(Dynamic Application Virtualization) allows an administrator to dynamically suite different plug-in and middleware application packages together with a primary application so that the applications can interact with each other, while maintaining only a single package for each application and reducing total package sizes. Updating packages is now much easier as there is only a single package to update for each application instead of many."

Now, I wonder if we have to worry about that old favorite; Application Conflicts?

I will spend some time later next week - and, so will post my findings as they trickle out of my ever more pressured schedule.