Getting Ready for Vista

Ran across this very important tool for application owners. If you haven't heard yet, or didn't get to see my NIWeek presentation, Vista has locked down file and registry access considerably to make the OS more secure. This has become known as User Access Control, or simply UAC.

To find out whether your program is going to have trouble on Vista, you can run it through this tool - which runs under Windows XP as well as Vista.

As I've mentioned in my presentation and on the DevZone, LabVIEW 8.20 is pretty much Vista ready. What do I mean by pretty much? Well, Vista hasn't released yet so we don't know what we might find between now and then. However, we've done a lot of testing with 8.20 on Vista so I'm pretty confident that at worst we're looking at a patch (now a good time to repeat that all views expressed on this blog are mine, and are not necessarily those of my employer - *laugh*).

That being said, just because you rebuild your LabVIEW application under 8.20, it doesn't mean that it's going to be UAC compliant. If you use the registry VIs to modify something in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then you're going to have problems. If you create or write to files in the Program Files directory, you're going to have trouble. Want to know all the details, take a long lunch and read this document.

So, if you have applications (LabVIEW built apps or otherwise), I'd recommend testing them sooner rather than later.