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We Live in Interesting Times (or: Windows Vista: Not For Developers)

Tuesday 30th January, 2007


With the consumer release of Windows Vista happening today (and being much lower key than I expected, quite frankly) I think it is time to dust off this blog entry I drafted a couple of months ago. It pretty much sums out my take on this operating system, and why I've no time for those who waste energy bashing each new OS release (Windows XP suffered the same grumpy reception back in 2001) rather than looking ahead to see where it is likely to lead.

I consider Vista to be an interesting release.

Regardless of what we (developers) think of the features and look and feel in this (or any operating system), we aren't the people who will buy the product en-masse - that honour (or otherwise, if you prefer) falls to the so called "average consumer".

The "average consumer" probably doesn't care one bit about the fine details of whether Windows XP is "good enough" (and let's face it, it is - as was Windows 2000 before it and Windows NT before that). They are the people who actually buy things because of glossy adverts, or because it looks "new and flashy" in the store (and who will need support when it turns out to be not quite what they expected).

Developers aren't so gullible (or at least, we would like to think we aren't!).

More importantly, "average consumers" are the people who don't look after their systems (most either don't know, don't care or both) and they are the people who own unprotected and unpatched systems crawling with spyware and adware. Even people in professional occupations fall victim to this, as our own experience can attest.

In other words, "average consumers" are the people who own the machines which have been unwittingly co-opted into botnets and are sending you spam and mounting phishing and denial-of-service attacks at the behest of the scum who seek to use unprotected computers to defraud others. It has been estimated that up to one quarter of all personal computers connected to the internet are part of a botnet.

"Average consumers" are the people at whom the changes to the user interface and security model in Vista are targeted. Although these changes will cause us developers pain (our experience bears this out already) the changes to the security model have the potential to finally start to do something about the vulnerability of new consumer systems (furthermore, the changes to the user interface offer us the opportunity to improve the usability of our own products - if we can be bothered. Many developers can't, sadly).

Although new exploits will always be discovered - and many users will ignore the resulting patches - with Vista Microsoft has raised the bar against the spammers and internet fraudsters. It will take time, but if this doesn't have an impact on the spammers I rather doubt anything will.

On that grounds above all else, I'm all for it.

Posted by Anna at 10:31am | Get Permalink


Running Visual Lint under Windows Vista

Saturday 20th January, 2007


In the FAQ for Visual Lint we state that "We are in the process of testing on Windows Vista, and hope to have a compatible version soon. Please contact us if you have any queries about compatibility with a particular platform."

We've been using Vista routinely now since the release of RC1 back in September, and have had the RTM version running for over a month now. As a result we now have a pretty good idea what changes we need to make to support the new platform, and those are now well underway.

The good news is that Visual Lint seems to work just fine under Vista (we've tested pretty extensively with VS2003 and VS2005), but installation is a little tricky at the moment. Although we are in the process of writing a new installer to work around the issues we've encountered, it is (unfortunately) not yet ready.

So, in the meantime, I'd like to discuss how to get current versions of Visual Lint working under Vista.

The main issue is that if you attempt to install Visual Lint on a Vista system which has Hardware DEP (Data Execution Prevention) enabled, you are likely to see the following message during installation:

Error message during installation
Error message during installation.

Attempting to register the DLL from the command line (note that it must be an admin prompt or UAC will disallow the action) will also fail:

Crash in regsvr32.dll
Crash in regsvr32.dll.

The crash is caused by a conflict between the Vista implementation of Hardware DEP (which is much more aggressive than that provided with WinXP) and the third party solution we use to handle licence keys and provide some level of protection against crackers. The vendor are aware of this issue but do not currently have a solution available.

Fortunately there is a workaround. In order to install the software, you can either:

Vista by default installs with DEP enabled on "essential Windows processes and services only", so in order to use the second method DEP must be disabled on regsvr32.exe. This can be accomplished from the "Performance Options" property sheet, accessible via System Properties:

Disabling DEP for regsvr32.exe and Visual Studio
Disabling DEP for regsvr32.exe and Visual Studio.

Note however that any Visual Studio IDEs you intend to use should also have DEP disabled, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Once this has been done and the system restarted Visual Lint should install and run without issues:

Visual Lint running under Vista
Visual Lint running under Vista.

If you identify any other issues with Vista, we'd be very interested to hear them.

Posted by Anna at 10:16am | Get Permalink


Visual Lint 1.5.2.62 has been released

Thursday 11th January, 2007


We are pleased to announce that Visual Lint 1.5.2.62 is now available.

This is a maintenance release, and contains no new functionality over that in 1.5.1.61. We have however made a number of minor improvements and bug fixes.

The following changes are includedd:

Further details can be found at http://www.riverblade.co/products/visual_lint.

We are continuing to develop Visual Lint so if you have any suggestions or feature requests, please let us know. The next build will include support for Embedded Visual C++ 4.0, so if you are using this platform, we'd be very interested to hear from you.

Beyond that, our immediate focus is full support for Windows Vista. This requires a number of UI changes (in order to comply with the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines) as well as a new installer (while current versions of Visual Lint will run under Windows Vista, installation on this platform is currently a little tricky for reasons which are unfortunately beyond our control*). We will of course continue to support previous platforms back to Windows 2000 SP4.

* I'll be blogging about this shortly, but in the meantime if you are experiencing difficulties installing under Windows Vista and require assistance please contact us and we'll walk you though it.

As ever, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us. We welcome your feedback.

Posted by Anna at 11:22am | Get Permalink