For you all you appcompat hacks out there is a new bible; Microsoft's Windows Application Quality Cookbook: A Developer’s Guide to Application Compatibility, Reliability, and Performance has been released and contains a really good overview of what may cause your applications to fail when deployed to Windows 7 (the prettier, slightly faster version of Vista).
The Word document can be found here;
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Windows7AppQuality/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1734
There are a couple of things I found intriguing about this "Compatibility Cookbook". The first is the location. It currently resides under the code sample area of the developer support site for Microsoft (MSDN). Whereas the current "production" version of the Vista compatibility cookbook resides under a "proper" download destination and can be found here;
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=69C63073-FE3F-47C3-BAA5-B37943AFE227
The next thing, I found interesting about the Window 7 compatibility cookbook was that it listed the potential compatibility issues in order of severity (i.e. their potential impact) and their likelihood of occurring (probability). Reading from this document it looks like the biggest most likeliest challenges for getting applications working on Windows 7 will include;
- Internet Explorer 8—User Agent String
- Internet Explorer 8—Data Execution Protection/NX
- Removal of Windows Mail
- Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)—Removal of Windows 2000 Client Support Service
- Compatibility—Operating System Versioning
For those of us in the dirtiest of trades (getting applications to work), we better get ready to sharpen our IE8 compatibility knives. With more and more cloud-based applications on the horizon, there may be carnage.
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