InstallSite Blog : Application Compatibility

Windows 7 with IE and Ballot Screen in Europe

stefan — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:46:24 GMT

Microsoft will ship the full Windows 7 with Internet Explorer in Europe, instead of the previously proposed “Windows 7 E” version without any browser.

In June, Microsoft had announced that they would remove Internet Explorer from Windows 7 in order to “comply with European competition law” as they said. As a side effect, users in the EU would not have been able to do an in-place upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. This decision caused protest from columnists, consumers and also from the European Union.

As a result, Microsoft dropped their plans for the “E” version and will instead ship the full Windows 7 in Europe. However users (only in Europe) will be presented with a “ballot screen” where they can select an alternative browser instead of Internet Explorer. You can read more about this (including a screenshot of the ballot screen) in Microsoft’s legal and policy blog.

It’s good to see they found a consumer friendly solution, although I find it strange that Microsoft is required to advertise their competitors’ products.

I wonder if other companies will now follow Microsoft and also offer ballot screens. For instance Adobe, who always offer Google Toolbar to me, whenever I download Adobe Reader or Flash player, should give me a choice of other browser toolbars. Or – maybe better not. I’d prefer Adobe, Apple, Sun and everyone would get rid of these toolbars they bundle with their software.

What Developers should know about Windows 7 without Internet Explorer

stefan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:12:28 GMT

As you've probably read before, in Europe Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer. This edition will be called "Windows 7 E" and Internet Explorer will not be included for legal reasons. Users will be able to install IE themselves, but it will not be installed by default. For the same reason, users in Europe won't be able to perform an in-place update from Windows Vista to Windows 7. Instead they need to do a clean install, essentially removing IE from their system.

This means that your application may run on a Windows system without any default web browser. This could cause problems if you try to open a web page from your application or from your setup program.

Note that the underlying "internet web platform component" is present even on Windows 7 E, so things like HTML help and embedded WebBrowser controls will work, but opening a web browser window will not.

The Windows Team has published some developer FAQs around Windows 7 E in their blog:
Windows 7 E Best Practices for ISVs

MSI Compatibility: Lying about VersionNT and ServicePackLevel

stefan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:39:33 GMT

MSI 5 on Windows 7 introduces a new application compatibility setting, as Chris Jackson describes in his blog.

To work around too strict OS version checks in LaunchConditions, Windows Installer can automatically try several variations of values for the VersionNT and ServicePackLevel properties to circumvent the condition. For instance it will start with VersionNT=600 (Windows Vista) and ServicePackLevel=14, then count down the SP level (13, 12, …, 0), then repeat the same with VersionNT=502 (Windows Server 2003) and so on, until the LaunchCondition succeeds. This is a per-msi setting on the local machine, which can be turned on using this dialog:

According to the blog, Windows Installer also sets these properties which might be useful to detect that version lying is going on:

SHIMFLAGS
SHIMVERSIONNT
SHIMSERVICEPACKLEVEL

As far as I know these properties are currently not documented in MSDN.

Original article:
Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

False Positives in Windows 7's Installer Detection

stefan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:18:00 GMT

When User Account Control (UAC ) was introduced in Windows Vista it would have caused problems for many existing setups because they required full administrator permissions. Therefore Microsoft added heuristical detection for installers. For instance if it detects a keyword like “setup” or “installer” in the exe file name or in the resources it assumes that this is a setup program and displays the UAC prompt to elevate the program to the full administrator token. This can however cause problems if your program actually isn’t a setup but is falsely identified as one by the installer heuristic (“false positive”). To avoid this you could add a manifest to your application to tell Windows Vista that it’s not a setup.

Windows 7 has similar functionality, but it ignores the information you put in the manifest for Windows Vista – you have to add another piece of data especially for Windows 7. Chris Jackson, who is an Architect and the Technical Lead for the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team, blogged about this problem, and a possible fix.

PCA Changes for Windows 7: How To Tell Us You are Not an Installer, Take 2 (because we changed the rules on you)

Why UAC isn’t a security boundary, and how auto-elevation works on Windows 7

stefan — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:44:10 GMT

Mark Russinovich (of SysInternals fame and now employed as a Technical Fellow at Microsoft) has published an interesting article about User Account Control (UAC) in the July issue of TechNet Magazine.

He discusses the goal of UAC, why it could be circumvented by malware, and how auto-elevation on Windows 7 avoids elevation prompts from system tasks.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.07.uac.aspx

Windows 7 disguises as Vista to MSI Custom Actions

stefan — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:46:57 GMT

In every new version of Windows, Microsoft includes numerous “shims” to improve compatibility with existing software. These shims are applied on a per-application basis. You can see which shims apply to an application using the Compatibility Administrator which is part of the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) – Download ACT version 5.5

The below screenshot shows the application compatibility settings for msiexec.exe, the process that runs all Windows Installer (MSI) setups.

As you can see among the shims that apply to Windows Installer there is VistaRTMVersionLie. This setting causes the GetVersionEx API to return Windows Vista values on Windows 7,when called from a custom action in a MSI setup.

Note that this only applies when a custom action checks for the Windows version using the GetVersionEx API. However the pre-defined MSI property VersionNT will properly be set to 601 on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as documented. (Remember that that the VersionNT value is not 700 as one might expect, which is another application compatibility measure to work around setups that check the major OS version number.)

For information about the other shims that apply to MSI setups and a discussion about the “OS version lying” see Chris Jackson’s blog where he states that “there’s an arms race between app compat and the people who want to do the checks”.