User Account Control and Application Compatibility Tools

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Johnny AppCompat here, Product Manager for Windows Vista Application Compatibility. User Account Control in Windows Vista is a great improvement for IT Pros in implementing a true Standard User across their organization. However, with the implementation of UAC, you may also run across some Application Compatibility issues you need to address, so I thought we’d better give you a head’s up on what tools will be available, how you can get them ASAP, and how you can help us make them better.

First up for IT Pros is the Application Compatibility Toolkit version 5.0. This toolkit will be loaded with goodies! It will help you analyze your portfolio of Applications, Web Sites, and Computers, evaluate operating system deployments and the impact of operating system updates, centrally manage application compatibility evaluators (for Inventory, UAC, IE, etc.), help rationalize and prioritize applications, allow you to add and manage custom issues and solutions and deploy automated mitigations to known compatibility issues. (Yep, including those identified with the User Account Control evaluator). You’ll even be able to share your testing results with others through the Online Compatibility Exchange.

For developers testing their own applications, there will be some assistance as well. The Standard User Analyzer will help identify programmatic operations during the development process that will not work for standard users. This tool will be the successor to the Limited User Account Predictor that is included in the Application Verifier today.

Both of these applications will be available in BETA form in alignment with the release of Windows Vista Beta2. You’ll need to sign up for the Application Compatibility Toolkit Beta at https://connect.microsoft.com/ and the Standard User Analyzer will be a download from the application compatibility site. (We’ll definitely let you know here if we can sneak them out of the door a little earlier)

As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback on these tools as soon as you get them. We want to make them great!

Be sure and check https://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/appcompat for all the latest. And we just launched our own AppCompat blog at https://blogs.technet.com/all_things_appcompat/. Please check it out and tell us what you want to know.

- Johnny