Announcing Microsoft Standard User Analyzer Beta 1

The UAC team has just released the first beta version of the Microsoft Standard User Analyzer (SUA) tool. SUA is a tool that independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT developers can use to diagnose and identify possible application compatibility issues when migrating applications from running as administrator on down level Windows operating systems to Windows Vista which even with administrators run most programs with standard user privileges by default.

SUA is a runtime diagnose tool and has two modes, predictive mode and diagnose mode. In predictive mode, the application being tested is launched elevated with administrative privileges. SUA works by monitoring a set of selected APIs that are used to access resources, like files and registry keys, on the operating system. During application runtime, SUA interprets how each API is called, monitors the result, and logs the result on whether such a call will succeed or fail when the application is running as standard user instead of as administrator. This allows the application to be fully exercised to provide a high level summary of all the potential standard user issues in the application. In diagnose mode, the application being tested is launch with a standard user token. The application may fail at the first error it encounters. This mode is useful if you want to test the application in a standard user environment after you have fixed all the issues identified by SUA in the predictive mode.


Figure 1 Screenshot of Standard User Analyzer Beta 1

As we progress in our understanding of standard user application compatibility issues, we will be integrating our knowledge into the next beta version of the tool. We hope you will find this tool useful in helping you change your application to be standard user ready on Windows Vista.

Please visit the Standard User Analyzer site to obtain additional information and to download the tool.

 

Thanks,

Wei Wang

Lead SDE/T

Windows Security