Windows 7 - 1st in a Series

 

Well, I have been working with the Microsoft teams and busily reviewing the update Windows 7 documentation and it looks like there will be a few compatibility issues with Windows 7 that are in addition to the issues experienced by Vista.

 

In case you missed it, I posted the location of the Microsoft  Application Quality Cookbook you can find it here;

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Windows7AppQuality

 

I will be tackling a number of issues over the coming weeks which should cover;

 

• Internet Explorer 8
• Windows 2008 R2 Compatibility
• Deprecated Windows Components
• Driver and Sub-system compatibility

 

In this blog posting I wanted to discuss the removal of Windows Mail from Windows 7. I am not quite sure why  this component was included in Vista but now ALL of the Windows Mail components have now been removed from the current version of Windows 7. Reading from the Microsoft Application Quality Cookbook, it looks like the following actions have been implemented;

 

• All entry points to Windows Mail and Contacts are removed or disabled.
• Any APIs that attempt to launch the main browser UI have been modified to create a silent failure.
• Protocol (mailto, ldap, news, snews, nntp) handlers will not be associated with Windows Mail or Contacts.
• File associations (.eml, .nws, .contact, .group, .wab, .p7c, .vfc) are broken or disabled.
• The Contacts folder is hidden by default so customers will not see it
• APIs are marked as deprecated in MSDN
• The file preview function is removed
• Shell hooks in the right click menu are removed
• The file search function is removed

 

Some of the good news for this update include;

• Publicly documented APIs continue to work as they did in Windows Vista
• Any user files (for example, contact files or messages) remain on the system in the upgrade scenario

 

Microsoft recommends the following advice for handling these issues;

 

• Do not design code that calls the Windows Mail UI API, since it will not work.
• You must find other ways to access the .eml and .nws files.
• Discontinue your reliance on all other Windows Mail APIs.

 

Hmmm... I guess you could always install Outlook....