Porting C++ Application From XP to Vista/7

Question

I have a C++ application that I have written for Windows XP, and I would like to port it for use on Windows Vista/7. It uses some MFC (for serial I/O) and ATL (for WMI), but it primarily uses the good ol' fashioned Windows API. What are some of the got-yas I should keep in mind when porting my application? Thanks.

Answer 1

You probably don't need to do anything at all. In general, applications written for XP run fine on Vista and Windows 7. (Device drivers and other such low-level code may be a different story.)

Are you having problems running it on Vista or Windows 7? Have you even tried?

Some possible gotchas:

• security (does your app assume it is running as Administrator and has complete control over the machine?)
• cosmetic issues (due to changes in window and control appearance in Vista and 7)
• hard-coded file/directory paths
• a lot more users run 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and 7 than ever used 64-bit XP. So if you have a 32-bit app and you dynamically load code (DLLs, ActiveX controls, etc.), you may run into 32-vs.-64-bit issues.

Answer 2

The Application Compatibility Toolkit will help you spot issues your application might have porting to Vista/Win 7:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=c4a25ab9-649d-4a1b-b4a7-c9d8b095df18&displaylang=en

Answer 3

I'd second Michael Burr's suggestion to use the AppCompat toolkit, as that will spot most of the likely problems. Some general rules of thumb:

• Don't write data to HKLM aside from in the installer. Use HKCU. Any read/writes to HKLM may be virtualised and you may get very strange behaviour when switching between user accounts
• Don't use hardcoded paths, use SHGetFolderLocation
• Don't write data to system areas such as c:\\windows , c:\\program files , etc. If you do need to write data that has to be available to all users, use CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA ( c:\\ProgramData by default)

Assuming that you do most of these things right anyway then I would think you won't have any major issues supporting Vista/Win7.