Vista compatibility

[David_Lieberman]

I sell a "shrink wrap" application developed with Labview 7.1 on Windows XP.  The application uses no device drivers, no system calls, nothing at all out of the ordinary.  It could have been coded in Visual Basic or any of a number of programming languages.  I chose Labview because of its relative platform independence (it also runs on Macs) and excellent math library.

It has recently come to my attention that when a user tries to run the application on a Vista system it aborts immediately.

This is a major problem.  I have about 1,000 users out there.  Since most of them bought the product through university bookstores or from a publisher, I don't even know who they are. Furthermore, I have a publisher with several thousand shrink wrap disks in inventory.

As you can see, this is an economic catastrophe of major proportions.  (Well, It isn't exactly Fannie Mae, so perhaps I exaggerate). 

So other than expressions of sympathy can someone tell me if he has confronted a similar situation and how he dealt with it?  And does someone knows of a magic Vista setting which suddenly makes applications compatible? 

And please don't tell me to upgrade to the latest version of Labview:  that will have no effect at all on my customers who do not have Labview and furthermore haven't even heard of Labview. 

Thanks,

David 

[falkpl]

I have had a relativly smooth change to vista.  There are a few things that I have found to be problematic, mostly due to where you are writing to the file system (In XP and earlier you had free range on file io).  If it is a file io error the application would generate an error cluster and this should be caught by your application idealy so you can handle it.  Do you have good error handling in your application?   There are a few compatibility work arounds (not exactly a magic bullet but does help sometimes) which are "run as administrator" in vista rightclick menue from youe executable and set the .exe property compatability tab to run in compatability mode.  Any error messages on the source of the application quiting?

[David_Lieberman]

Paul,  Thanks a lot.

I agree that this is most likely a file I/O problem.  I have a "play date" with a friend who has a Vista machine for Sunday and I'll let you know how things turn out.

David

[waldemar.hersacher]

I also have an app develop with 7.1.1 on Win XP. This app also needs only LV basic functions and VIs. There is no installation needed it runs with just all the files in the proper locations.

This app is distributed  to about 400 people using them under Win 98 to Vista. The program makes read access in the registry to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and file I/O in an folder which the user must have full access anyway.

Users using Vista reported me that it will work with setting the compabilitiy in Vista to Win XP.

I guess to look at the compabilitiy, registry functions and the file IO locations.  

[smercurio_fc]

---

David Lieberman wrote:

And please don't tell me to upgrade to the latest version of Labview:  that will have no effect at all on my customers who do not have Labview and furthermore haven't even heard of Labview. 

---

I'm not sure I really understand this comment. If you're distributing a "shrink wrap" application then the users need the LabVIEW Run-Time Engine. This is a fact. Doesn't your installer install the Run-Time Engine? If not, then the user would need to install it themselves. Thus, what difference does it make whether or not you upgrade, since the installer will install the Run-Time Engine that's required for the version of LabVIEW that you developed in.

All in all, even though you don't want to hear it, you should upgrade. 

[David_Lieberman]

---

smercurio_fc wrote:

---

David Lieberman wrote:

And please don't tell me to upgrade to the latest version of Labview:  that will have no effect at all on my customers who do not have Labview and furthermore haven't even heard of Labview. 

---

I'm not sure I really understand this comment. If you're distributing a "shrink wrap" application then the users need the LabVIEW Run-Time Engine. This is a fact. Doesn't your installer install the Run-Time Engine? If not, then the user would need to install it themselves. Thus, what difference does it make whether or not you upgrade, since the installer will install the Run-Time Engine that's required for the version of LabVIEW that you developed in.

All in all, even though you don't want to hear it, you should upgrade. 

---

Actually, we don't have an installer. The program runs directly from the production CD which indeed has the Labview runtime. It is a "lightweight" application which leaves nothing on the user's system. Put in the CD. Run the program. Take out the CD. Goodbye. You say "what difference does it make whether or not you upgrade..." Exactly. Then you say I should upgrade. So what is the logical link between those two statements? David

[David_Lieberman]

Waldemar and Paul,

Thanks for your help.

I got ahold of a Vista system this afternoon.

I verified that the program doesn't run from the distribution CD. But when I copied the executable directly from my XP development system to the Vista system it ran without a hitch.

The problem seems to be that our distributor added some copy protection software (called "Hexalock") to our program which prevents the program from running unless the CD is present in the drive. This software seems to be incompatible with Vista.

This does not solve our problem (user's who upgrade their OS to Vista are going to be furious with us) but at least we know the cause and can put in place some operational procedures to help them out.

Thanks again,

David

[waldemar.hersacher]

Dear David,

I have found the following information about Hexalock and Vista on the company website.

[David_Lieberman]

Great!  That's the first place I should have looked but the Hexalock possibility slipped my mind since it was done three years ago.

Thanks so much.

David

P.S.  A naive question;  how do you rate an answer.  The instructions say that you click on a link at the bottom of the message but I don't see a link.

[dan_u]

You'll need a few more posts (I think you need 50 of them) before you can rate answers.

This was introduced to minimize misuse of the rating system.

Daniel